I just wanted to write a little note about the updated OneNote for iPhone and the native iPad version which were released on Monday.  We have been listening to all of your feedback and working hard to get an update out there.  You can read about the new version here: OneNote for iOS gets new features, arrives in new markets worldwide.  Thanks for all of your feedback and please keep it coming! 

Finally happy holidays & happy new year from everyone on the OneNote team to you and your families.

Omer Atay, a developer on the OneNote team, has written a set of tools in his spare time called Onetastic. This PowerToy for OneNote 2010 adds three new features:

• The ability to rotate & flip document printouts like Images
• A chronological view of your OneNote pages (OneCalendar)
• A clean-up option for an information bar alert in multi-page printouts

If you use your notebooks to manage your to-do list or as a repository of miscellaneous thoughts, you'll find OneCalendar extremely useful for looking through your usage history. It's helped me discover more than a couple of tasks that got buried in my extensive Unfiled Notes section.

You can learn more about the tools on Omer's website, or you can download them from here. If you have any feedback, please let Omer know in the comments below!

I wanted to share a new commercial which should be airing soon which features OneNote.  It is part of the It’s a great time to be a family campaign:

Hope you enjoy and if you see it on the air please mention where you saw it!!

I wanted to pass on details that a couple OneNote books are coming out soon and if you are looking to learn more about OneNote you should check them out.

First of all is Michael Oldenburg’s book: Using Microsoft OneNote 2010 which is now available for purchase as well as immediate Kindle download (in the US not sure about everywhere else).  You might have seen Michael’s name before because he is man behind the OneNote blog and he has been involved with the OneNote team for years and he is an overall great guy.  What I find most interesting about this book, besides all of the awesome content, is that is comes with over 3 hours of free video.  The video includes step-by-step video tutorials that you can watch and learn about OneNote.  Seems like a great resource, I just downloaded it to my Kindle and I will be flipping through it.  Highly recommend this one:

The second book is Microsoft OneNote 2010 Plain & Simple by Peter Weverka.   I didn’t know about this book until the blog post from Microsoft Press.  Based on the table of contents it seems like a pretty good book and also Microsoft Press books are generally quite good.

If you are looking for a book about OneNote either for yourself, a new student, or to learn more please check out one of these books.

Following up on yesterday's release of the C++ header, we're publishing the OneNote 2010 XSD schema, which should make it easy for you to validate your XML data when reading or writing to the COM API. You can also use it to auto generate classes for native OneNote data structures using Visual Studio , and I've written up a short tutorial on how to do that.

Generating Classes from XSD Files

1.) Start an elevated command prompt, and create a new folder called OneNoteClasses in your C drive

 cd C:\
 
 mkdir OneNoteClasses 

2.) Visual Studio 2010 packs a powerful XSD manipulation tool - xsd.exe, which we will use to generate our classes. Navigate to the bin folder that contains xsd.exe (or add the folder your PATH variable) : 

 cd C:\Program Files (x86)\Microsoft SDKs\Windows\v7.0A\bin\

3.) We're going to run the XSD.exe tool with a few parameters - the source XSD file,  a flag that tells it to generate classes for the data types, and an output folder. In this case, I have my xsd file on the C: drive, so I run: 

 xsd.exe C:\OneNote14Schema.xsd /c /out:"C:\OneNoteClasses"

This should create a C# (.cs) file in your folder which contains all the classes, which is around 5600 lines of code. You can find more documentation about using xsd.exe here.

Alternatively, you could use Xsd2Code, a plugin for Visual Studio that lets you run the same command from the GUI.

Today, we're releasing the OneNote14 C++ header file which should make it easy for you to build OneNote add-ins. You can find the header file attached to the bottom of this post. Here's a quick example demonstrating how you could use the header file to get XML representation of the OneNote Hierarchy .

1.)  Open Visual Studio and create a New C++ Win32 Console Application

2.)  Download the header file, and copy it into your project folder with the C++ source files

3.) The following sample code, taken from the OneNote12 header post should still work, and output the XML hierarchy data of all open notebooks in your OneNote client. Just paste it into your newly created project and run it:  

#include "stdafx.h"
#include "onenote14.h"
 
 
 
 int _tmain(int argc, _TCHAR* argv[])
 
 {
 
 CoInitialize(NULL);
 
 IApplication* piOneNote;
 
 
 
 CoCreateInstance(__uuidof(Application), NULL,
 CLSCTX_LOCAL_SERVER, __uuidof(IApplication), (void**)&piOneNote);
 
 
 
 if(piOneNote)
 {
 
 BSTR temp; 
 
 HRESULT hr = piOneNote->GetHierarchy(NULL, hsNotebooks, &temp);
 
 wprintf(L"%s", temp);
 
 }
 
 }

Here are some other resources that you might find useful: -

OneNote 2010 Developer Reference

Tutorial: Creating extensions with the OneNote OM

OneNote Object Model for C#

I wanted to pass on a few awesome posts by a new team member, Varun Srinivasan, who has been exploring how to use OneNote with Python.  I wanted to share for people who wanted to learn how to connect OneNote with their favourite Python projects:

• Python, OneNote & You
• Python, OneNote & You, Pt. 2 - Parsing OneNote XML to JSON

Please check it out if you have been trying to get OneNote working with Python.  Great stuff Varun!

I wanted to point out a new video that Doug posted showing OneNote on the go:

Thanks Doug!

Today we released a non-security update for OneNote 2010, here are the details from the Microsoft Office SE blog:

A non-security update for OneNote 2010 32-bit/64-bit Editions was also released.  This update provides fixes associated with displaying search results, fixes to optical character recognition (OCR), indexing, and displaying of inserted documents.  Additional information can be found in the Microsoft Knowledge Base article Update for Microsoft OneNote 2010 (KB2493983). 

We heard a bunch of people mentioning this on the OneNote Answers Forum and we were able to figure out the problem and get a fix out for you all.  We apologize for this inconvenience and encourage all users to upgrade today to fix up any issues you might have.  Thank you much and please let us know if you have other concerns/issues! 

A friend from college, Paul Mestemaker, is a co-host of a weekly video of what is happening at Microsoft called Ping! and he invited me to talk about the OneNote for iPhone launch.  Here is the video:

My part comes on at the 5:30 mark.  Thanks again Paul and I hope you all enjoy, very different being on camera : )

I wanted to point everyone to the OneNote for iPhone Product Guide (pdf) which has a bunch of great info on OneNote for iPhone.  It includes tips on how it works, what you see in the app and more.  Check it out if you would like to learn more about OneNote for iPhone.

First of all thank you very much for your interest in OneNote Mobile for the iPhone, there has been a tremendous response thus far.

We have received reports from customers who are hitting an error on initial login, with the following message: "Login failed, error: 400".

The team has been investigating the issue and believe we have identified the cause. We are working on an update. However the underlying cause is an intermittent issue, due to overwhelming interest in the app. The workaround is to keep trying to sign in, once you get past this error then OneNote will sync without any problem.

Thank you for your patience and interest in OneNote, we all apologize for the inconvenience.

For the select customers facing Inking issues with OneNote 2010 we highly recommend that you install the newest update released today.  This update contains fixes for many of the ink issues you all were facing. 

Update for Microsoft OneNote 2010 (KB2288640), 32-Bit Edition

Update for Microsoft OneNote 2010 (KB2288640), 64-Bit Edition

Microsoft has released an update for Microsoft OneNote 2010. This update is an accumulation of the latest fixes, including solutions within the ink feature, and with the linked-notes feature affecting Turkish language users.

These should also be available on Microsoft Update (Windows Update) later today but if you want to install the updates right away please use the links above.  Again thank you for using OneNote your patience.  If you face more ink issues please comment below and we will continue to monitor customer feedback (per usual).

We've heard reports from customers that ink they are creating on their Tablet PC in OneNote 2010 sometimes moves or shifts unexpectedly.  We know how frustrating this can be and are trying to release a public update to address this issue as quickly (and safely) as possible.  To that end, we believe we have a fix and we are looking for beta testers before the public release.
 
If you are interested, please contact us via this blog (email or comments w/your email address) and we'll follow up with you once the build is ready.  Thank you so much for your help with this and for your patience.

Update: We are no longer in need of people, thank you very much to everyone who offered to help, much appreciated!

Right-click on a folder and choose “Open as Notebook in OneNote” was a little used power feature we had in OneNote 2007 was removed in 2010 because many people were confused by it.  Many people just didn’t know how to use it and we improved our open experience in OneNote to people wouldn’t need to do this.  That being said I wanted to let you know that if you _really_ missed this you can add it back via the registry, just add this:

Windows Registry Editor Version 5.00

[HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\Directory\shell\OneNote.Open]
@="Open as Notebook in OneNote"

[HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\Directory\shell\OneNote.Open\Command]
@="C:\\PROGRA~1\\MICROS~3\\Office14\\ONENOTE.EXE \"%L\""

(or whatever you have for your location of OneNote)

This should be it and you are done. 

I wanted to point out a few links for all of the SharePoint admins & deployment folks out there:

• Co-authoring overview (SharePoint Server 2010)
  http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ff718249.aspx
• Co-authoring administration (SharePoint Server 2010)
  http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ff718235.aspx
• Configure versioning for co-authoring (SharePoint Server 2010)
  http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ff718246.aspx
• Configure the co-authoring versioning period (SharePoint Server 2010)
  http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ff718243.aspx
• Configure the maximum number of co-authoring authors (SharePoint Server 2010)
  http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ff718248.aspx
• Disable co-authoring (SharePoint Server 2010)
  http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ff718245.aspx

In particular for OneNote I wanted to point out these tips:

OneNote Notebooks

Unlike Microsoft Word and Microsoft PowerPoint, Microsoft OneNote stores version information within the file itself. For this reason, administrators should follow these recommended practices when storing OneNote notebooks in a SharePoint Server document library:

• Do not enable minor versioning. This is the default setting in SharePoint Server 2010.
• If major versioning is enabled, set a reasonable maximum number of versions to store. By default, major versioning is not enabled in SharePoint Server 2010.

If you have questions please let us know!

I wanted to post a video that one of my coworkers, Olya, did to help new users understand OneNote:

It is super quick and useful and also you might notice that music in the background is done by another OneNote team member, Mike.

Brent Whichel a technology specialist at Microsoft has a cool screencast talking about OneNote 2010, check it out:

OneNote 2010 from Brent Whichel on Vimeo.

My favourite part is how he says that people either love OneNote or they just haven’t heard about OneNote yet.  I have found that very true

You can see some other cool stuff Brent is doing over at Office-411.com, thanks Brent!

I wanted to point out an update from our friends at Office Labs who just released Ribbon Hero for OneNote 2007 & OneNote 2010:

Ribbon Hero Update: New Support for OneNote!

If you haven’t seen Ribbon Hero is a fun way to learn more about the Office apps you use everyday.  And you can challenge others by showing off your high score or share your high score on Facebook.

Please check it out and enjoy!  Thanks Office Labs folks!

Just a bit of a cross-post: OneNote has plenty of new features for Office 2010, but in this short video, Doug Thomas from Office Casual gives a simple overview of this program for gathering and sharing ideas; a scrapbook for your computer.

Thanks Doug!