Introduction

This blog provides updates on a product called “Note Wizard” which integrates Evernote data to Salesforce.com

This product is in public beta release which means that its ready for testing and features and bug fixes are in progress.

Please note that the intended audience at this stage is experienced Salesforce administrators or technical folks. As it moves to Appexchange certification, I’ll add some business use case demos.

Take a look at the screencasts for a quick introduction

Follow me on Twitter if you fancy more regular updates.

The Note Wizard is live

After an extensive audit of security the Wizard is now a certified application on the Appexchange.

Its now visible and installable from the public Appexchange so feel free to give it a try.

Thanks to everyone that has helped me get to this point. I’m fascinated to see where it goes from here.

New Feature and getting close to being live

I had a good suggestion on the feedback site which was requesting support for migrating text only Notes. I thought that was a good idea and so I’ve added support for these Notes and released the code today.

I’ve also re-submitted the application to the Apexchange Review team so, with luck, it could be live on the Appexchange soon.

Getting close to public release

I’m about to submit to the Appexchange review board for certification i.e. the Wizard will be live and ready for use – even with the Professional Edition of Salesforce.com. If you want to take an early look you can see the listing here. Take a look at the demo video in the listing – its an easy way to understand the value of this integration.

Beta release available

Well, its been a lot of work but I’ve just released the beta version of the Note Wizard.

This version is greatly improved from the Alpha and I welcome all feedback and suggestions.

The easiest way to learn about it is to take a look at the updated screencasts

Thanks to everybody that has provided feedback and support until now. I hope you find this new release useful

Uservoice feedback site available

Its been a while since I’ve published any activity but that’s because I’ve had my head down working on the beta release. Its a couple of weeks away from public release now so I’m preparing some infrastructure around it. First of all I want to allow all the folks who have installed the alpha and provided feedback with a better mechanism for suggesting features. Hence the new UserVoice site that I’ve just created. Its a little premature because the beta is not out yet but I’m just getting my “ducks in a row”. Watch this space, there will be a new release soon….

Thoughts on text recognition and using this tool

Its common for people to make the assumption that Evernote and, by extension, the Note Wizard is a text recognition tool. That is not accurate. Here’s why…

The purpose of the text recognition engine in Evernote is to support search. This means that it can take many guesses at a word and then use all those guesses when returning search results. When used with handwritten notes or any text in an image, this is an extremely useful tool for “memory extension”.

Using this data for true text recognition is not very accurate because the best guess for each word is not always correct (although its pretty close). This means that the data recognised is best used for search in Salesforce. That said, for decent quality images, its often good enough.

The greatest factor in the quality of the text recognition is the quality of the picture. Camera phones (iPhone or Blackberry) take low resolution images and don’t work well in bad light. When capturing handwritten notes your scrawl can often make it impossible to recgonize text. I’ve tried taking notes with careful writing and it works quite well but nowhere near 100% – but for a search it would be fine.

(Update : I just heard about a special iPhone skin that greatly increases the quality of close-up images. I’ll get one and will give it a try)

The best capture for any paper document is a scanner.  A digital camera (5 Megapixel or more) is almost the same as a scanner. This works when capturing something like business cards, meeting notes, receipts, etc. but it takes time. On the other hand, taking a picture of a whiteboard from a meeting must be done with a camera or smartphone.

The other factor is Evernotes native client software. On the iPhone you can install the Evernote client and directly tag, folder and name the note. When you save it on the phone its uploaded to Evernote – really simple. These notes appear immediately in the Note Wizard list – quite a neat trick.

On a Blackberry there’s no Evernote client but you can email your snapped picture to your Evernote account so its not too bad. You can also use a tool called ShoZu to automate this email process.

The holy grail is to use one device (your phone) to capture notes. That means knowing how to take the best quality snapshots from your smartphone. Most take bad photos at short distances so you will need to position your document at least two feet from the camera. This makes it important to use good light and hold the phone very still. I’d recommend resting the phone on a surface when snapping whenever possible.

With all this in mind, the best use case (so far) for the Note Wizard is taking pictures of meeting notes from a whiteboard and then migrating them into a (searchable) Activity record in Salesforce. It works quite well for business cards but not great, you might find that its quicker to type in the details manually or, best of all, use a Card Scanner but using a phone is so cool that its worth a try!

The upshot of all this is that I’m not sure what the killer use case for the Note Wizard is going to be. I’m hoping to get a good discussion going here on this blog and see how deep this rabbit hole goes. If you have an idea, I’d love to hear it!

Architecture

I thought you might like to know about the tech behind this tool. Its a combination of Force.com and the Google Web Toolkit. It runs on Amazon EC2 and uses S3 for storing meta data. I’ve also added memcached to speed it up and to support scaling. Its been a great learning experience to use all this technology.

Some history

About 4 months ago I heard a podcast about a product called Evernote. It indexes anything that you want to capture and makes it searchable. I thought that this was a great idea and signed up immediately.

Using it made me understand just how powerful it was (it can even search your handwriting) and it occurred to me that the data it generates could be very useful if migrated into other platforms. The obvious one for me is Salesforce.com since that’s my area of expertise and so this project was born.

My goal is to allow easy migration of somewhat unstructured data from Evernote into very structured data in the Force.com platform. While I can think of quite a few potential uses for this product (business cards, meeting notes, whiteboards, expense receipts etc), I’m sure that there are lots that I haven’t discovered. Thus I’m building a data mapping feature that will allow anyone to migrate text from Evernote’s into any standard or custom object(s) in Force.com. It will be interesting to see how the community uses this creatively.

With support from the excellent technical team at Evernote I’ve got a working alpha release of this product and I’m working fast to get it to beta quality. I plan to be able to show you screenshots and a screencast in the coming week.