Chris Pratley's Office Labs and OneNote Blog

It's been about a month since we went live with officelabs.com. Of course as a team we’ve been operating a little over a year, but only now do I get to talk about that period. I thought I might fill you all in on my transition from OneNote to Office Labs.

As Office 2007 was wrapping up, my second son Skye was born. (I'm sitting next to him on a plane to Toronto as I write this).  I took my paternity leave and when I came back in the fall of 2006 Office 2007 was just wrapping up. I went to work for Jeff Raikes, the president of the Business Division at the time. He had asked me earlier to come do a job for him whenever I was able to move on from Office2007.

Jeff had a two-part mission for me that was simple to say and hard to do. Basically he said, "help the division try more ideas", and "explain to the world and the company what our long term vision is for productivity". Right, roll up those sleeves and start knitting Petunia!

For background, the business division covers several product lines: Office System (which includes the Office applications, SharePoint server and a lot of other components and servers), Office Live  - the productivity service, Unified Communications (UC) which includes Exchange, Live Meeting and Office Communicator (enterprise IM), and Microsoft Business Solutions (MBS), which provides "software to run businesses" such as ERP, CRM and several other three letter acronyms . Basically the business division as a whole is focused on "productivity" - helping people get stuff done  - whether it be at home, school, or work.

I worked in the Office group for 12 years, first a little on Excel, then a lot on Word, all of OneNote, and a little on Publisher. I was quite familiar with the Office team's processes for developing software which are in my opinion first-rate. Relative to just about any software project in the world, the scale of a release of Office is huge, the quality that comes out is excellent and always improving, and it gets done more or less on time which is a semi-miracle in software development. But that doesn’t mean Office and its processes can't improve - in fact the Office team is first to criticize themselves and work on ways to do better.

The other parts of our division have their own styles and personalities. Office Live is fairly fast moving, Unified Communications is always up for a new idea, and MBS is consolidating  and growing its scope at the same time. Jeff had asked me to help the division "try more ideas". Ok, where to start?

One thing that was clear was the different viewpoints on "innovation". Some people in the company felt that we didn't explore new ideas and technology well or fast enough. Others felt we had no problem and that we took the right measured approach to new things. I think many readers who work in corporations are familiar with this range of opinions about their business. Sometimes it can get a little nasty - the "gotta innovate" people think the others are blind curmudgeons who couldn't imagine anything other than what they have today. The "steady as she goes" folks think the others are lightweights, chasing the latest trends and not being appropriately thoughtful about business results. That's a caricature but you get the idea.

Our popular culture definitely is biased toward the new - we tend to place it on a pedestal, and imbue words like "invention, innovator, entrepreneur" with mystical heroic qualities. People admire and many aspire to be seen as innovators. The innovator who makes a $100m/yr company is lauded. The guy who quietly makes a billion dollars a quarter doing what they did last year is ignored. Note: as much as John Q. Public admires the former, shareholders really like the second type of guy. Delorean makes a good story, but we can't name who at Toyota made them the #1 car company in the world.

I'm conscious as I write this that the "blogosphere" tends to have a huge bias in favor of rapidly embracing the latest thing - most of us are in that "gotta innovate" group - more than even the general public. But a criticism of that approach especially for a larger company is that you can't always be chasing "shiny objects". You have to deliver business value. Speed for speed's sake is also not a good idea. How do you act appropriately fast enough without just churning? After all, while consumers might say they want a new thing every day, enterprise customers tell us they can't handle the pace of change we throw at them today. What to do?

I didn't want to fix a phantom problem. I also felt during my time in Office that we could make some improvements to the system, as good as it was.

One thing I felt strongly was that the people who said we don't have enough good ideas were flat wrong.  There is no shortage of great ideas at Microsoft. I also felt that our product groups, even the "old" ones, had the appetite to take big risks. Just look at the new Ribbon UI for Office 2007. We also had the capacity to develop entirely new things on our own - look at OneNote, or SharePoint. Where it seemed we could use a "tweak" was in five areas:

1. Improving the number of risky or uncertain areas we explore at any time
2. Increasing the "stakes" of the areas we explore - place bigger bets
3. Decreasing the iteration time for designs (more iterations, faster in response to user feedback)
4. Accelerate in time the delivery of new ideas (get them to market faster)
5. Easier exploration of ideas that didn't already have someone working in the area

We're trying to tackle all of these with Office Labs. Our team extends the already solid Office development process to enable those product teams and others across the business division to try more stuff. When I write next I'll go into more detail.

One closing thought. We work with the whole business division (which makes more than Office). We also aspire to create entre products and services, which may not be called "Office".  So why did we call ourselves Office Labs? The answer is that Office is really well known and is much bigger in scope than most people realize. So it actually covers a lot of the productivity area. Trying to come up with a name that was generic like "business division labs" or "productivity labs" seemed lame. And choosing a fancy sounding name just to be cool was not our style. So Office Labs it is - Office System is our largest and most important client, and its definition is always growing - in fact we hope to be part of that growth.

For some time I've been quiet about what I have been up to since leaving the OneNote team in the capable hands of David and the gang. Well, today my new team's external site went live at http://officelabs.com.

As you can see on that site, Office Labs is a "try it and see what there is to find" kind of place. We experiment with many different ideas, large and small. Most of them stay internal to Microsoft because they just aren’t as interesting as we hoped, or we can find out what we need from internal usage. But some of them we will be putting out on officelabs.com for the general public (you folks!) to try so we can understand how "normal" people would use these tools. Now of course, as we bloggers and blog-readers know, we're not actually normal - you could even debate whether the blogosphere is more warped than the set of Microsoft employees, who comprise an interesting cross-section of job types, experiences, and cultures. But I digress.

Head on over to http://officelabs.com and check it out. We'll have more projects to share throughout the year.

It's been awhile since I have posted anything here, and for that I feel shame. It's just that Dan and John and others are doing such a great job.

Another guy who's doing a great job but isn't blogging yet (he's shy) is Mike Tholfsen. Mike is the test manager of the OneNote team, and he's also a tireless (and I mean tireless) OneNote promoter inside Microsoft. You may remember Mike as the guy who wrote "My One and only OneNote".

Microsoft is getting to be a pretty big company these days, and we make so many things that it is hard for people to keep track of it all. So as odd as it may seem, teams that make products that are not already ubiquitous (like Outlook or Windows) sometimes have to remind others that they exist.

Actually OneNote is in broad usage in the company already - it has taken off virally and in any meeting or lecture I go to, if a laptop is open more often than not OneNote is there as people keep track of what is said and what they need to do next. In fact the usage data shows that for people who have it installed (more than half the company - pretty good!), they use it more than PowerPoint.

Where Mike comes in is in expanding people's perceptions of what OneNote can do. When you first use it, it seems like a way to organize your stuff, but it can be so much more. For example, my new team uses many shared OneNote notebooks to collaborate and share ideas like a really capable wiki. OneNote notebooks can also be packaged up as a single file to email or download which will "unpack' inside OneNote when you open them. This may sound like nothing special, but the effect is that you can distribute entire "courses" or books of material to a broad set of people, replete with cross links and organization, tables of contents, etc. Plus the content can be added to or annotated by the recipients (unlike a PDF). and these materials can be searched and arranged with all your other material so they become part of your stuff in a way isolated PDF or Word docs or random web pages can't. The other day I got an email inviting me to download an entire course on how to manage email and tasks effectively (something everyone in corporate settings struggles with), and it came as a OneNote notebook.

What Mike has done is make a point of meeting with all the right executives, sales people, and so on to get across to them that OneNote can be more than a note-taking tool. He's made videos internally and externally, like this one to show the power and ease of use of OneNote, in particular focusing recently on this "content distribution" aspect of OneNote to replace paper for green corporate or academic initiatives. He's helped the Office marketing folks see this potential in OneNote too.

He's worked with the people who do internal training at Microsoft to get them excited, and through them connections have been made to customers who also are interested in training. It's been amazing to watch. He even demoed to Bill Gates! He's also been active in the academic world, visiting a local school where the staff and kids were independently using OneNote, and even going to a conference in Finland on technology trends in teaching with one of the teachers. There's a neat video of what the school has done here.

So hats off to Mike. Now we just need him to spend a few cycles on his day job :-)

It's getting hard to keep blogging about OneNote in detail now that I am no longer on the team, but I thought I would do a little round-up of some interesting developments in the last couple of months.

Onenote usage is really taking off as I talked about last post. The numbers are good of course, but I also love the anecdotes. Recently I have had the opportunity to talk in front of several large audiences internal to Microsoft and asked them if they used it significantly. Holy Smokes! More than 3/4 of the room each time. You might think that's nothing special because they're Microsoft people, but they're too busy to use products that aren't valuable to them just like everyone else. A great rush each time. It's the shape of things to come.

David Tse released his Web Exporter PowerToy. This tool allows OneNote to publish an HTML+JScript view of a notebook to a web server (including SharePoint). There are several nice things about this tool:

• it allows casual browsers to read the notebook contents - they don't have to have OneNote
• it automatically republishes the notebook on a schedule so it stays up to date as you (and others) update the editable OneNote version
• it helps out a lot of OneNote fans who were concerned about being the first few people in their organization who use OneNote
• it is released via the Microsoft Shared source program on Codeplex so you can see how it was made and use the code yourself.
• David made it in his spare time at work - it's cool to work at Microsoft!

There are several new MS bloggers about OneNote:

• David Tse (Program Manager on the OneNote team, mentioned above)
• John Guin (Tester on the OneNote team)
• Michael Oldenberg (User Assistance and documentation specialist - big OneNote fan)

Dan Escapa (another PM on the OneNote team - you really should subscribe to his feed) continues to fire out a prodigious amount of material about OneNote including these gems:

• Snag-it outputs to OneNote 2007
• including OneNote pages in Vista's start menu search
• search and replace PowerToy
• sort pages PowerToy
• sort sections PowerToy

Jeff Raikes, President of the Microsoft Business Division, huge OneNote user, and also my new manager got profiled here on how he uses OneNote. You might think this is some gimmick but it's not. I'm impressed with his usage since *on his own* he has adopted just about every scenario we envisaged for the product such as taking notes (in ink!), keeping track of tasks connected with Outlook, connecting meetings in his calendar with OneNote notes, annotating files like PowerPoint slides, even sharing notebooks with his assistant. Unfortunately they couldn't show his actual data for privacy reasons in the demo because his real usage is way more detailed and impressive than the demo. The demo captures the essence though which is the point. He's probably the best most complete, effective user of the product I know. All that and he happens to run the division. I can't say he got there because of OneNote but he is showing me a thing or two about how to be organized and on top of things!

A couple of Microsoft colleagues went to a local grade school awhile back to see how they are revitalizing the classroom with computers. This school has put a lot of thought into their program. They use OneNote for every student with a shared notebook for each class. The teacher puts assignments in the notebook and the kids work on them individually or in groups, with OneNote syncing the data and a keeping it organized. They use OneNote's features for capturing web pages, keeping documents together, and drawing. What they told me was really impressive - even more than the ideas we had for OneNote in education. It made me jealous for no longer being on the team!

A big shout-out to the guys at gottabemobile.com. Rob Bushway, Warner Crocker and others are big OneNote fans and keep everyone up to date on the latest news about hardware, OneNote and anything mobile - especially Tablet PCs.

I follow the comments that are posted here and any mail sent to me through the blog. I love hearing from you all - it's my daily pick-up! If you have support questions however, I highly recommend posting to the user group since the experts there can usually help better and faster than I can.

Cheers, and have a great rest of summer!

What an exciting three months OneNote 2007 has had out in the marketplace. By every measure OneNote 2007 is a hit! Check out this blog activity for one thing:

I'm hearing some buzz about a 90-day offer going on in Australia. If you are a student at one of about 30 universities, you can get the "Ultimate" edition of Office 2007 (includes OneNote!)  for AUS$75 which is about 5% of what it costs to buy if you were to pay full price (which no one does of course, but it is still an amazing deal). Alternatively you can "rent to own" for AUS$25/yr for three years. Too good to be true? No, it's for real.

You can read more here: http://www.itsnotcheating.com.au/form.asp

And bland details here: http://www.microsoft.com/australia/education/unistudentoffer/default.mspx

I looked into this a bit and while some people in Australia are speculating a lot about why this promotion is going on, the background is pretty simple. The fact is most university students can already get Office for about this price from their university because their university negotiated it into their purchase agreement on behalf of the students. The students just don't know it. And the universities find it a hassle to get the product out to students because they have to do all the muck work: getting boxes stocked, checking IDs, making sure people don't buy more than one, etc. So they don't promote it. This trial offer in Australia is experimenting with Microsoft handling the work. As long as the particular university you attend has purchased the right for all its students to have the software, you can just get a licence key directly from Microsoft. The difference is that the students have to get their own bits (usually download the free trial).

Pretty good deal. If you're a student in Australia, go for it!

I don't know anything about whether this program will be extended or offered in more places, so please don't ask, OK?

Dan Escapa is on a tear releasing a set of new PowerToys for OneNote 2007. What's going on is that a whole bunch of PowerToys were written internally on the OneNote team and by some of our "friends" inside the company over the last six months. As the 2007 has now shipped (and therefore the API set is frozen) these Powertoys are getting finalized. And if I know Dan, he's been too busy to get them out but now he's a man with a mission. PowerToys are a way to add features that we couldn't do in core code on the main schedule. Of course powertoys are not tested as much, so they are basically "use at your own risk". (rarely a problem is encountered though in my experience)

Here are the ones out so far:

Word Count. We get asked by some people to be able to know how many words are on a page for articles and essays and so on. here you go.

Send to OneNote (from the file explorer/shell). Ever looked at a file in My Documents or elsewhere and thought, "I want to push that into OneNote so I can add it to my project, make some comments about it, etc? Now you can.

Export Outlook Notes to OneNote. Lots of people use Outlook's Notes feature to keep track of little scraps of info. Or rather, they used to use it until OneNote came along and blew it away. Now you can push all those little honeys into OneNote where they belong.

More to come. Stay tuned to Dan's blog.

UPDATE: Dan's got another powertoy, this time it is "Sort Pages". You can now put all your pages in alphabetical order. Rock on, Dan!

Yes, the final code of OneNote 2007 is now available for purchase in an actual box (with a curvy corner no less and fancy pull out center: here are some samples if you haven't been down to a store yet). Of course OneNote is available along with Office 2007 and Windows Vista today. This is hardly news for most people in the tech world but it's a big deal for all of us who worked on it so I wanted to mark the occasion.

As we near the expiry of beta 2 of office 2007 products (build 4017 in Help/About) on Feb 1, I expect to hear from several people who are still using that build for some reason (I am already hearing from them in fact).

Likewise there are people still running beta 2 tech refresh (build 4407 in Help/About) which expires Mar 31.

To everyone running a beta version: stop doing that. You will be much happier.

If you have decided you will keep using OneNote now that you've experienced the beta, and I am sure that is every single one of you :-), the simplest thing to do would be to go buy the full version (version 4518 in Help/About). You can uninstall the beta version and then install the final code of OneNote. All your notes will be there - no worries. I personally wouldn't even bother with a backup, but that is me.

I realize that many people are in special circumstances though. If you are expecting your company or university to provide the new version for free or highly subsidized, but they are taking their sweet time doing so, you can maximize the amount of time you can use OneNote 2007 with full editing capabilities while avoiding spending any of your own stash. If you just need 60 days or less, I would uninstall the beta and install the trial version which gives you the final code and all the capabilities for 60 days. Well, you won't get save as PDF with the trial until you convert it to the full version. (update: a change was made Feb 1 to allow trial to validate so you can get this now). If you think they won't give you what you need within 60 days, and you are still running one of the beta versions, you could stay on beta 2 tech refresh until it expires on Mar 31, then switch to the trial for another 60 days after that. For those of you still running plain beta 2 (build 4017) you can patch to beta 2 tech refresh build 4407 here. There's no need to wait to do this as the expiry date is fixed unlike with the trial.

Once you are running final code (either the trial version or the full version), you can't go back to beta code (or 2003) - the betas and 2003 will not read files updated by the final 2007 version. That said, don't stick around on the beta code longer than you have to - we fixed a lot of bugs between that version and the final release so it pains me to think people are using it even now.

If you have the trial right now, when you buy the full version just activate your trial installation in Help/Activate Product using the product key of the final version. Don't bother to uninstall and reinstall because the code is the same. Activation of the trial over the internet is limited right now (in some cases because we're limited to certain countries where laws make it easy to support credit card use over the net). For others, you can buy a product key from a retailer (or a box) just like you buy pre-paid phone minutes, or just buy from an on-line retailer (unless the credit card thing makes that hard where you are).

Of course a better option than buying standalone OneNote is to get the Home and Student edition of Office 2007. For just a few dollars more than OneNote standalone you get not only OneNote but also Word, Excel, and PowerPoint 2007 - and they rock. If you do this, note that you need to unistall the standalone trial version before installing Home and Student as the licensing is not quite the same. If you had been trialing the Office Home and Student version then you don't need to uninstall. Gosh - so complicated. Just make sure that the full version you are installing matches the trial version you purchased - if not you need to unstall the trial first.

I'm also hearing from people who recently got a computer that came with a trial version of OneNote 2003 installed (PC makers are still selling some machines with that installed). Obviously I suggest you not bother with that and recommend you go get the 2007 trial. Even if you have already started using the 2003 trial, just uninstall it and download the 2007 trial - it will pick up where you were, extend the expiry date, and no data will be lost.

Once again I feel like giving a little "boo-yeah' to the OneNote team. Although for all of us here in product development the 2007 release is now "ancient history" we're still dang proud of it. You guys rock!

I also want to mention some resources you really should use:

1. Dan Escapa, a program manager on the OneNote team has taken on the mantle of regular OneNote poster now that I am no longer an "insider". Go bug him and ask him questions. He is really great at responding. In particular, go ask him to create 2007 and 2008 calendar templates for OneNote (he did the 2006 ones).

2. If you have a support question about OneNote (not working right as far as you can tell), please ask your question in the newsgroup. I am of course happy to help if I can but like any good designer I only know what the product is supposed to do. People in the newsgroups can respond quicker and also tell you what the product actually does. :-)

For any MS-people reading this, check out my internal blog and discussion of my new team here: http://msblogs/chrispr. We're hiring!

Till next time...

I sometimes get asked if there is a "viewer" available for OneNote files. There are viewers available for Word, Excel and PowerPoint (among others) so this is a natural question.

The answer for OneNote is yes: it is called the trial version. You download it here for free, and it lets anyone view and search and print OneNote files with perfect fidelity. Oh, it also lets you *edit* and create such files for the first 60days. And you can convert this viewer into the full product by purchasing a license and activating it with the code you get when you purchase (no additional download required).

As I write this, the viewer (trial) is only available for residents of the US, Canada, France, Germany and Japan (thanks for the update Patrick!), but it will be available much more broadly shortly (as it gets rolled out for markets where using a credit card to purchase online is not as feasible). It's also a pretty hefty download (195MB) since it contains the entire product but with broadband it's just a few extra minutes.

Ok, now you might be saying: Chris, don't be smarmy. A trial is not actually a viewer. The difference might be a smaller download, no limitation on which markets can access it, and um, something else I suppose - oh yeah, cross platform. :-)

Many people asking for a viewer are concerned that others cannot read files they send from OneNote. We anticipated that, which is why there are so many options for output in other formats such as Word, PDF, and HTML. And it is also why when you use the email function (with Outlook) we include HTML in the message body so any recipient can view the notes. (a full OneNote format attachment is included for colleagues who use OneNote)

Once in awhile someone asks why there is even a separate OneNote file format at all. After all, if OneNote used some other format there'd be no need for a viewer. Suffice it to say many of the slick things we do with auto-save, multi-user, remote sync of internet-based notes and so on require it, not to mention many other features that are better and more robust as a result. Other file formats are optimized for something other than what we need, be it feature set of some unrelated product, human readability, backwards compatibility with some other older product, etc. We actually have a lot of innovation baked into our format that helps OneNote be what it is.

So, why isn't there a viewer for OneNote other than the trial? The answer is that making a special viewer is non-trivial work, especially testing (and forget cross-platform - that is nearly a whole new product). OneNote is a small team, and every bit of work we do on a viewer means we don't get to work on something else that many people have begged us to add (as I wrote nearly three years ago). The trial covers most people's viewer needs (and then some) so the few extra % of users the viewer would help lose out to the people who are ecstatic that we added other much-requested features to the product instead.

(Update 7/20/07: David Tse from the OneNote team has made a PowerToy that publishes an HTML view of a notebook packaged as an MHT file. It is designed for use with Sharepoint but can be used elsewhere. Give it a try) 

As Dan mentioned on his blog, those of you waiting to try out the final code (everyone currently using beta for sure!) can now download a 60-day trial of OneNote 2007 here. There is a full trial of Office 2007 Professional as well which of course is worht giving a spin too - and it shows off OneNote at its best with the full Outlook integration, blogging support through Word2007, etc. This trial version will last until after retail boxes are available in stores, and of course you can always convert the trial to a full version on-line.

For those of you not familiar with how the trial works, it is the *exact same code* as the final full release - not a lower functionality version. The difference with the full version is that the trial is set to "expire" after 60 days, meaning that the data in it becomes read-only at that point. You can remove the expiration at any time by activating it with a key that you buy over the net or in a store. So if you do decide to get the retail boxed version of OneNote in January or later, you don't have to uninstall and reinstall, just use the product key that came with the version you purchased.

You should *definitely* move to the trial if you are currently a beta user. The trial can read your beta or beta 2 tech refresh notes just fine. Uninstalling the beta and installing the trial will not cause any hiccup for you.

If you have Vista final release code, you need the trial (or MSDN full version) since beta versions of OneNote 2007 are not compatible with the final release of Vista.

The final version (in trial form or otherwise) has a number of fixes in it for stability, performance, search, and syncing of shared notebooks since b2tr, and of course hundreds of other fixes you may or may not have noticed in the beta.

Edit: if you have been running b2tr of OneNote or Office, bear in mind that final versions of any of these products cannot co-exist with b2tr versions of any of them. So the 2007 trial version of OneNote does not work with Office 2007 b2tr. 2007 trial version of OneNote cannot be installed when any fragment of b2tr is left installed, and that includes the b2tr version of the PDF add-in or the office file compatibility pack. Remove any and all trace of anything b2tr before installing the trial. There is a trial version of Office 2007 available at the same URL above so you can install that to replace b2tr - they expire at about the same time (the trial will last longer depending on when you start the 60-day clock by installing and running it) so you might as well run final code!

Enjoy!

We're done! As you may have heard, 2007 Office System (including OneNote!) went golden on Friday. We had a great ship party with lots of OneNote purple hair and not just on the OneNote team!

I'd like to thank all of you who participated in the beta program and gave us feedback, whether it be direct bug reports and requests through the beta site, the Connect site, the public newsgroup, this blog or other paths, crash and hang reports, or Customer Experience Improvement Program usage data. It all helped make a better product and is much appreciated.

OneNote 2007 is a milestone for the product since it not only delivers a whole set of new capabilities and features, but expands the scope of what "OneNote" means. With 2003 many people referred to OneNote as (merely) a "note-taking" product (and often mistakenly only for TabletPC). With 2007, OneNote has grown up to be much more than that description. OneNote 2007 is now a lightweight collaboration tool for small groups and teams. Shared notebooks, wiki-like functionality, and the ability to work on shared items online and offline and have even complex changes sync and merge is unparalleled in the software world.

At the same time, the "personal organization" aspect of OneNote has expanded. It's a great tool for people to manage their effort to get things done. With the new links to Outlook such as two-way task sync, notes on contacts, and the ability to send emails into OneNote the integration with Office is very strong. The ability to have multiple notebooks and to use note flags to categorize notes help you organize your projects and notes effectively.

OneNote also makes a great research tool, whether for personal or shared research. You can clip things from the web as HTML or web clippings (images). Images are indexed for searching just like text. When you clip from the web or office document types, a link is retained to the source. Unlike other research tools, you can highlight or annotate research with ink or text or voice to remind yourself or others as to why you chose to keep that information, and order the research in ways that make sense to you, not just "collections".

OneNote helps a lot with running a great, effective meeting too. If others have OneNote, you can use a live shared session to collaborate immediately on a  very rich shared editing surface. You can use OneNote to capture notes of course, and those "notes" can even be a meeting recording in audio and video. Simply using OneNote to build an agenda and then sticking to it as you take notes and using tasks and flags makes the meeting go better.

I covered the list of top new features here when beta 1 launched, including OneNote Mobile for Smartphones and PocketPC. It has links to detailed blog entries on each area. Check it out!

Looking forward, we are thinking really broadly about the future of productivity and how OneNote can help people be more effective. We know that most people who use OneNote use it a lot - they live in it. To us this means that OneNote has hit a chord by matching more closely to the way people work than traditional tools do - so much day to day work is just dealing with information so this makes sense. I think you'll all be pleasantly surprised as we get more clear on the plans for the future.

Finally, on a personal note, after five years almost to the day working on OneNote including the time before it had a team, I have accepted a new position in the company doing some exciting new work. You'll hear more from me later about that, but for now you can be sure I'll continue to stay in touch, writing about OneNote as I hear more stories about people using it. Keep in mind that there are now many people on the OneNote team blogging. Here are some samples you should check out: Dan, David, Olya, Owen and others.

I want to close by saying that it has been an honour and a privilege to work with the OneNote team over the years. The team is a model of customer engagement at Microsoft (literally!) and I am so proud of the dedication to delighting customers that the team has had from the start.

Go OneNote!

Just a quick note to let you all know that if you are using beta 2 of OneNote, you can download the new tech refresh here. Note that this is *not* a single click update. Read the instructions on the page before installing or you will regret it.

This refresh represents about 4 months of bug fixing and stabilization, and is near-final code. You *really* should get it if you are running beta 2 already on Windows XP. You more or less *must* get the update if you are moving to Vista RC1. Installation should be painless (but follow the instructions!). It is a patch that runs and then you just keep working with no loss of data or anything to migrate. 

You'll get asked to install the updated Windows Desktop search component if you want to keep using search-related features in OneNote. The new WDS version released about 2 weeks ago is a huge improvement over the beta version that OneNote beta 2 used - you will find the most annoying issues are gone, including the fact that WDS 3.0 now includes its UI again (much like WDS 2.6) so you can search your desktop too!

Please note that B2TR is only available as a (free, I think) *patch*. That means you need to already have the matching 2007 Office beta 2 product to install it. (e.g. if you have only beta 2 of OneNote, you can patch just that. But you need to patch all the beta 2 products you have installed - B2 and B2TR 2007 products cannot coexist)

Also, since there are now roughly 7 zillion beta 2 users, the powers that be decided a few weeks ago to start recovering the cost of supporting the petabytes of downloads by charging new beta 2 users $1.50 per download. This isn't much (half a latte) but it is not zero so be aware of that. They do not make the price clear until several screens through the registration process. If you are not an existing Beta 2 user and can't spring the $1.50, you need to wait for the final release.

Final release is still scheduled for the fall (for customers who just get the CD/DVD or access to downloads such as corporations and institutions) with "retail availability" in early 2007 (i.e. in boxes in stores)

As far as new features in beta 2TR, there are a few, such as the ability to see changes in pages made by time or whether you've read them or not, and the blogging integration with Word 2007 more or less works out of the box. I will provide more details when I find out where they are listed (remember I've been away... and for me its hard to remember what beta 2 looked like)

What happens when you put together a dedicated Test Manager, a loyalty-inspiring hot product, and some talent for music? You get the next great underground internet music hit: My One and Only OneNote. (click to listen - recommend you open the link in another tab/window so you can follow the lyrics as you listen)

Mike Tholfsen, OneNote's multi-talented, community oriented and fierce customer advocate Test Manager has crafted a hit with this one. Here are the lyrics (you can see them on Mike's page but I'll save you the click). We have all been marveling today (when he sprung this on us) at how he worked in phrases like "XML APIs" and "merge and replication". Mike, I bow to the prodigious display of talent. Now we just need a video. Anyone?

My One and Only OneNote

Let me tell you 'bout my favorite application
A software notebook for the modern age
One place for all of your notes
Put any type of content on the digital page

A flexible tool that works the way you do
Organize your stuff how you want to
Brainstorms or meeting notes or doing web research
Capture, find, share and re-use

No other software can make me feel this way

My one and only OneNote
My one and only OneNote
My one and only OneNote
It's the one for me

Use a shared notebook for group collaboration 
Or start a live sharing session with your friends
Like a rich wiki with merge and replication
Everyone's in sync when the meeting ends

Tables, tags, clippings, instant search and Lasso
Drawing tools, embedded files and hyperlinks
XML APIs and caching all your data
Outlook integration and digital ink

No other software can make me feel this way

My one and only OneNote
My one and only OneNote
My one and only OneNote
It's the one for me

It's part of the 2007 Office System
Download OneNote for a 60 day trial
Give it a chance and I promise you
It will change the way you work and leave you with a smile

No other software can make me feel this way

My one and only OneNote
My one and only OneNote
My one and only OneNote
It's the one for me

Music and Lyrics by Mike Tholfsen ©2006

onenote_mike@hotmail.com

Hey folks, this is a quick note to let you know first of all that I am back on the blog after a 2 month hiatus for baby leave. I've just spent the last hour clearing out hundreds of fairly nasty comment spam so sorry if you had to endure that in your visits while I was gone.

Skye is growing up already (13lbs after 10 weeks!)  and I have to say he's got quite a pair of lungs after a slow start in that dep't. He sleeps incrementally more each night but 3hrs is still lucky. Gee was Ciarán this hard on the sleep cycle?

I actually got to use OneNote quite a bit during my leave for one of my favorite activities to use it for, which is trip planning. We decided that if we were going to have sleepless nights anyway, we might as well have them visiting friends on the East Coast and slumming in Europe rather than Seattle (no movie jokes please). This is the fourth or fifth trip I have planned using OneNote and it really works well. Here's how I do it:

1. Decide more or less where you want to go (e.g. Europe)
2. Get a map of Europe and clip it to OneNote
3. Highlight (with your mouse or pen) some places you definitely want to go. In our case, it was Paris (friends there plus hey, its Paris) and Schwetzingen, Germany (more friends there). After that, it was sort of wide open.
4. I already knew we were going to drive, as with two kids and more gear than we could carry going through crowded train stations with loads of steps was not going to work. So I proceeded to connect the dots on the map with places to go no more than about 3hrs drive apart. For each potential place I created a sub page in OneNote (e.g. Bruges/Brugge). I also used Rick Steve's travel guide to make it easier to pick spots to stop. FWIW I find his books, while kinda middle brow (and let it be known that I am strictly low brow), are really good at exactly what I used them for - sorting through where to go since they get right to it with what's worthwhile and what's not and how long each place deserves relative to the others and don’t gush about how wonderful all possible places are. For example, here's a suggested itinerary for Germany and Austria. And he lives in Seattle (well, nearby).
5. Next I did a bunch of web research on these places, and followed side tracks to other places that I found mentioned. When I saw some interesting activity or hotel described I copied that bit onto the subpage for that location.
6. Each location subpage had a table at the top with vital info such as the name, address and tel number of the hotel we would stay at, departure date, time we needed to depart by to make the next destination's activities, map to the hotel, confirmation number for reservation, etc. These pages got filled in at different times - some places had loads of info really quickly, others were blank for a long time. Often people would email me with ideas for each location so I'd dump those in there too.
7. I created an itinerary page with a big table showing where we would be on each date, tentative activities each day, where we would stay, time we had to leave, flight numbers if applicable, etc. Each location was a hyperlink to the subpage where there was more data about that place. This page was very useful as I could see how the whole trip was shaping up, and could adjust the time in each place if we looked like we'd be rushed, or add days to the overall trip, etc. When my wife wanted to see the plan, it was easy to browse the trip by following the hyperlinks to the detail pages.
8. Any travel info off the web such as flight data and rental car info I clipped and placed on that itinerary page too so it was all in one place.
9. Here's what it looked like (this is a preliminary version). Notice the page titles on the right with each location having its own page.

   

10. Finally, since I wasn't planning to bring my computer with me, I printed out the whole thing so each location had its own page(s). Each day I just peeled off those pages and worked from those notes.

Best European experiences (in order of impact at the time):

1. 0,5l (x3) of chill Leffe Blond in a hot Bruges Markt square after a long drive. Love that Leffe!
2. Walking along the Seine at twilight.
3. Stumbling into a hole in the wall restaurant near St Germain des Prés just as it started to rain and finding it just awesome.
4. Dining 3 levels deep in a private Viennese wine cellar
5. Sitting on top of the U Prince hotel in Prague having dinner at sunset

I suppose I should also include leaning into the back seat of our ridiculous rented Renault Kangoo to feed screaming Skye a bottle with my right hand while steering with my left doing 150km/h on the autobahn...