OneNote 12 - Working as a team with shared notebooks

re: OneNote 12 - Working as a team with shared notebooks

Richard — Tue, 27 Sep 2005 14:11:49 GMT

Soons so useful... when can I get it? When is the beta... or how about a CTP?

re: OneNote 12 - Working as a team with shared notebooks

Mikewo — Tue, 27 Sep 2005 15:06:17 GMT

ummm, WOW. Nice. Again, I look forward to see this in action.

re: OneNote 12 - Working as a team with shared notebooks

Michael Reinhart — Tue, 27 Sep 2005 15:29:13 GMT

Chris:

As always, I'm most impressed. Keep up the great work!

re: OneNote 12 - Working as a team with shared notebooks

sgim — Tue, 27 Sep 2005 15:43:54 GMT

The concept here is amazing. I have a tablet and feel so much more organized with the current version of OneNote. I understand that you don't need a tablet to use OneNote, so I really hope this catches on in our work place.
I think that without a tablet users often don't bring their laptops into meetings (they instead use paper). I know that those folks will not want to scan their notes into the computer and OneNote after every meeting.
If everyone in our company carried a tablet pc to meetings and used the next version of OneNote we would see significant improvements in so many areas where we rely on other slower methods of communication.

re: OneNote 12 - Working as a team with shared notebooks

Kresten — Tue, 27 Sep 2005 19:32:17 GMT

OneNote 12 sounds amazing! I desperately need the background OCR and the shared workbook (to share with myself, thank you very much). Please release it soon!

re: OneNote 12 - Working as a team with shared notebooks

Mike Watts — Tue, 27 Sep 2005 19:37:31 GMT

omg omg omg

I`ve only recently started using OneNote and I love it. I'm training to be a teacher at the moment and find it invaluable for organising all my stuff.

we've just started a project at our school where all the students in one year have been given tablets / laptops and are using OneNote in place of their exercise (and in some cases text books) Currently they use a healthy mix of nicely typed notes with scribbled annotations.

So far the results are promising, but with each update to your blog I get more and more excited about all the things we'll be able to do with all these fantastic features! (Maths would really like straight line drawing tools so they can draw graphs and shapes :)

re: OneNote 12 - Working as a team with shared notebooks

uslacker — Wed, 28 Sep 2005 01:46:37 GMT

So, is anyone blogging on the changes in 2003 SP2 or is it just bugfixes.

\\uslacker

re: OneNote 12 - Working as a team with shared notebooks

Richard — Wed, 28 Sep 2005 04:41:26 GMT

Hey Chris
One benefit I could see to this would be students collaborating on a class project... I think groups tend to divvy up tasks by function - I'll do this topic you do that topic, you create the slides, you find pictures of this and this, you find references of this... OneNote would be a better way than sharing doc files, and it would be a cheap way for students to collaborate with an educational discount (hint?)
Rich

re: OneNote 12 - Working as a team with shared notebooks

sbreck — Wed, 28 Sep 2005 06:36:05 GMT

Chris, thanks for the link. Looks like I will be upgrading myself and my team to OneNote 12 as soon as it is available. I take it the "shared session" concept is now integrated into the full-time operations of the OneNote file when it recognizes it to be in a shared location?

uslacker, I blogged on SP2... it's two bugfixes. Nothing exciting.

re: OneNote 12 - Working as a team with shared notebooks

Jeffrey — Wed, 28 Sep 2005 06:41:20 GMT

Chris -

Excellent! This pleases me greatly. (I also like your approach of spreading the word of features ahead of time, to build up community interest and excitement.)

Is there anything that I should be doing now to enable my organization to make use of this? What kinds of WebDAV servers will work with OneNote (other than SharePoint)? Will there be any new API's available, i.e. what kinds of data sources/sinks can we plan/speculate on integrating with OneNote?

Keep up the good work! (Include me in betas!) Good luck as you get closer to release!

re: OneNote 12 - Working as a team with shared notebooks

Chris_Pratley — Wed, 28 Sep 2005 21:28:50 GMT

Thanks for all the comments folks.

Our first beta will be available before the end of this year.

sgim, we find heavy usage of Onenote outside of meetings (and on desktops). People do web research, info organization, "getting things done" sorts of stuff. And of course collaboration. It's not just about mobility and meeting notes (although that is a part of it). You're right that taking notes in a a meeting can really help things. We see OneNote used a lot in meetings at Microsoft (notes are in ink or typed). The typed (or reco'd) notes get sent around later (if it is an important meeting) so everyone can agree and remember what transpired and who needs to do what.

Mike, Richard: stay tuned - we've got more goodies to talk about. And by the way, there are significant educational discounts, ranging from a price of $39-$49 for academic individual purchase to far lower per-unit purchases when a school buys in bulk.

uslacker: as Scott mentioned, Sp2 for Onenote is a set of bug fixes driven by the crash and hang reports people send us as well as top customer issues reported back. (FWIW, we continue to be the MOST STABLE app in the whole Office family!) There aren't any features (we were busy on OneNote 12 as you can probably tell).

Scott: shared session is still a DirectPlay based experience. What I described above is a file (or file diff) relay experience. With a fast network it can apear to be close to real-time (5-10sec delay for us internally on our 100Mb/s network using a file share), but it is not quite real-time. On a slower network especially with web-based storage the speed of updates making their way through the master on the server will slow down so you might see times more like 1-5 minutes. Shared notebooks are not for meetings - they are for longer term collab - a group repository for knowledge. Now, you could start a shared (real-time) session on any shared notebook page if you needed to use it in a meeting.

Jeffrey: WebDAV is a standard that lots of people implement. I don't have a full list, but any "hard drive in the sky" uses WebDAV. I believe portal software other than SharePoitn also uses it. Web sites that run Frontpage server extensions support it. I personally have used MSN Groups as well as SharePoint, as well as my personal web site that my ISP hosts. The easiest way to get going internally is to just use a normal file share as I mentioned. There are plenty of new APIs - more on that later.

re: OneNote 12 - Working as a team with shared notebooks

Andre — Sat, 01 Oct 2005 00:57:52 GMT

I have OneNote installed, but to be honest with you, I honestly don't use it a lot. Its a nice application but I truly believe I would be more productive with it if I owned a Tablet PC which I won't be investing until Windows Vista hits RTM. What I will do in the mean time is put a little more effort into using it to copy little bits of info that interest me on the web and past them into OneNote for future reference. I still believe though that OneNote and Tablet PC are bread and butter.

re: OneNote 12 - Working as a team with shared notebooks

Gordon Watts — Sun, 09 Oct 2005 13:39:36 GMT

The idea of collaborating with myself is great. I've been using a file-share and putting the notebooks on my portable. Works, but isn't that great (file locking issues, etc.). So I'm looking forward to this.

If we have a server, or we store the notebooks up on a web server (sharepoint, etc.) will there be any way to make them availible for others to read/look at? I guess I'm asking for automatic conversion from one note format to web format (pdf/html). It is good enough if I can write a script that will open onenote and do the conversion; I can script the web browser to do it in that case.

Also, have you given any thought to using OneNote as a lab notebook? A timeline display along the side might be nice. Currently to find the time I've written a paragraph I have to right click on the paragraph to get the pop-up menu. Something a bit more obvious would be cool. A nice thing about one note, of course, is you can go back and modify things; while I like being able to do that it shouldn't mess up the time line. ;-)

Keep up the great work!

Don't you just love pretending that your knock-offs are "innovation"?

J. Random Poster — Tue, 01 Nov 2005 06:35:40 GMT

If you want shared editing right now, get SubEthaEdit. This is a Macintosh app which won the Apple Design Award in the student category about two years ago.

Also, if you'd like to see what's coming up in One Note, check out the Mac apps it's copied from: NoteBook by Circus Ponies Software, and NoteTaker from AquaMinds. They're both derived from an earlier NeXTSTEP code base.

And, if you'd like to get software features now which won't make it to Windows for at least three years, the solution is to get a Mac.

MS: reinventing the wheel (poorly) since 1975. ("Roundness" feature deferred until post-longhorn.)

re: OneNote 12 - Working as a team with shared notebooks

Tom Maier — Tue, 06 Dec 2005 18:28:16 GMT

The difference between MS and Apple... MS is actually able to deliver products to the market. Oh ya, and Apple apologists whine a lot more.

re: OneNote 12 - Working as a team with shared notebooks

Chris_Pratley — Wed, 07 Dec 2005 09:50:04 GMT

J. Random Poster: In case you're interested, I wrote long ago (my second post ever) about how OneNote got started:
http://blogs.msdn.com/chris_pratley/archive/2004/01/30/64898.aspx.

BTW, current OneNote 2003 already has real-time shared editing (in a full 2-D text/ink/graphics space - not just in a 1-d text doc). See this post: http://blogs.msdn.com/chris_pratley/archive/2005/02/22/378667.aspx

re: Isn't this just a wiki? (offline support)

Julien Couvreur — Wed, 18 Jan 2006 21:54:58 GMT

FYI, a prototype for an AJAX-based online/offline wiki: http://blog.monstuff.com/archives/000272.html

This approach still takes a lot of work and needs to be improved, but it shows some promise.

re: OneNote 12 - Working as a team with shared notebooks

Chris_Pratley — Fri, 20 Jan 2006 09:36:15 GMT

Julien, the tricky part will be not just wrestling the browser into committing heinous acts of AJAX and Flash, but when you really get people editing the same stuff on different machines - the conflict resolution and auto-merging is where things get really nasty for non-trivial content (although merging streams of plain text is not too hard)

re: OneNote 12 - Working as a team with shared notebooks

philip copeland — Sun, 29 Jan 2006 06:46:25 GMT

Chris,

I'm loving OneNote 12 more and more each day. I experimented with "Sharing" today and just loved it. I'm trying to find a "step by step" way I can share my notebooks with myself. I have it hooked up on my home network, but I want to be able to get my office computer to sync up with my home desktop over the internet. Where can I learn how to do that?

re: OneNote 12 - Working as a team with shared notebooks

philip copeland — Sun, 29 Jan 2006 18:35:22 GMT

Let me clarify a bit (when I read my post later I couldn't make sense of it-I hate it when that happens!).

I am able to keep notebooks "in sync" on my home network via the shared notebook option. Yesterday, I experimented with live sharing sessions--I installed ON12 on my desktop at work and was able to use it everywhere I had internet access.

What I'd like is to be able to keep all three (desktop office, tablet, desktop home) in sync. I think that is one of the original visions of ON (and it is a perfect vision, IMO). What I need is a step-by-step way to do it.

If sharing to WebDAV is the way to go, I'd like a little bit more info on how to do it and what the possible downside is.

For what it's worth, I deeply thank you and all the OneNote12 team--this is an incredible resource that I am trumpeting to all my students, faculty and friends. They are usually all amazed at what it does.

re: OneNote 12 - Working as a team with shared notebooks

Chris_Pratley — Tue, 31 Jan 2006 21:02:54 GMT

Philip, thanks for the very kind words. You can sync your work machine with your home machines in one of two ways.
1. choose an internet server to host your notes. This can be a web site or "hard drive in the sky" site that supports WebDav (i.e. directly saving to that site). Then choose open notebook" from OneNote 12 and open a folder on that web drive as a notebook. Put everything there (even more notebooks if you want beside the one you made). Note that this does NOT work in OneNote 12 Beta 1. It will be working in beta 2.
2. pick a machine which all your machines can reach via network or VPN. In most cases that will be a machine at work (either your own machine or a server) since I suspect you can't VPN into your home network (if you can, great). Make the location of that note book or notebooks a folder share. Then use "open notebook" on that folder from all your other machines.
Either way, you can work on your notes as much as you like even without a connection. Syncing will happen when each machine can see the shared location (might be only when you VPN into work). Check out my earlier post on using OneNote 2003 on two or more machines - some of the concepts might be clearer even though this does not discuss Onenote 12: http://blogs.msdn.com/chris_pratley/archive/2005/06/25/432556.aspx

re: OneNote 12 - Working as a team with shared notebooks

philip copeland — Wed, 01 Feb 2006 00:58:54 GMT

Thanks for the answer, Chris. For some reason, I thought the WebDAV option was available now; so I've got a little more time to figure out the best WebDav product for me. Feel free to make a recommendation! And again, great work on ON12.

plc

OneNote 12 is now OneNote 2007, and it's in the box!

Chris Pratley's OneNote Blog — Thu, 16 Feb 2006 12:23:45 GMT

Naming baby!Today our branding folks finally unveiled the naming for Office 12 (which includes OneNote...

OneNote 12 Beta 1 released!

Chris Pratley's OneNote Blog — Sun, 19 Feb 2006 05:22:38 GMT

Beta 1 of "OneNote 12" (and "Office12") is now available for download for those people who are signed...

re: OneNote 12 - Working as a team with shared notebooks

Luke — Sat, 18 Mar 2006 16:55:42 GMT

The idea of collaborating with myself is great. I've been using a file-share and putting the notebooks on my portable. Works, but isn't that great.
http://www.thenotebookcomputer

re: OneNote 12 - Working as a team with shared notebooks

Chris_Pratley — Sat, 18 Mar 2006 22:32:38 GMT

Luke, are you using 2007? If so, when you say "isn't that great" can you elaborate?

re: OneNote 12 - Working as a team with shared notebooks

Naadir — Wed, 29 Mar 2006 17:34:06 GMT

Does this feature include version management, or is this best done by the server, i.e. Sharepoint?

re: OneNote 12 - Working as a team with shared notebooks

Chris_Pratley — Thu, 30 Mar 2006 00:11:32 GMT

Naadir, if the place you store the notebook has its own versioning (e.g. sharepoint) then you can use that. If not (e.g. a file share) then OneNote allows you to control how many versions back you would like to keep locally on your PC. The default is 2 but you can adjust that to be any number depending on how much disk space you want to use.

re: OneNote 12 - Working as a team with shared notebooks

Ed — Fri, 26 May 2006 18:35:26 GMT

How do I turn this offline caching thing off!!!! My One Note crashes since the offline cache file grows over 5 GB!!!

I am using Beta 2 on a tablet PC 2005, and have a lot of Audio and print files. This offline cache file is killing me! in disk usage and crashing. I went to Options and do not see how I can disable this "feature"

re: OneNote 12 - Working as a team with shared notebooks

Chris_Pratley — Fri, 26 May 2006 20:12:39 GMT

Ed, send me a mail at chrispr(at)microsoft.com and we'll take a look. The cache can't be shut off since it is integral to how OneNote 2007 works.

Syncing OneNote 2007 notes across your many PCs

Chris Pratley's OneNote Blog — Thu, 08 Jun 2006 10:20:06 GMT

Its an obvious thing. You have two or more PCs that you work with. You want to access all your stuff...

Syncing OneNote 2007 notes across your many PCs

Chris Pratley's OneNote Blog — Thu, 08 Jun 2006 10:46:42 GMT

Its an obvious thing. You have two or more PCs that you work with. You want to access all your stuff...

re: OneNote 12 - Working as a team with shared notebooks

ellen friedlander — Thu, 27 Jul 2006 20:44:06 GMT

Chris, if we could talk, re vision for notes across many pc's
949-305-0707 home
949-412-2708 cell

Assigning Outlook tasks from OneNote shared notebooks

About OneNote — Fri, 06 Oct 2006 03:10:14 GMT

If you are not familiar with creating Outlook tasks flags from OneNote notes and synchronizing them,

Syncing OneNote 2007 notes across your many PCs

Chris Pratley's OneNote Blog — Mon, 04 Dec 2006 09:24:52 GMT

Its an obvious thing. You have two or more PCs that you work with. You want to access all your stuff

OneNote 12 is now OneNote 2007, and it's in the box!

Chris Pratley's OneNote Blog — Mon, 04 Dec 2006 09:26:55 GMT

Naming baby! Today our branding folks finally unveiled the naming for Office 12 (which includes OneNote

OneNote 12 Beta 1 released!

Chris Pratley's OneNote Blog — Mon, 04 Dec 2006 09:27:38 GMT

Beta 1 of "OneNote 12" (and "Office12") is now available for download for those people who are signed

OneNote 2003 SP2 details

Chris Pratley's OneNote Blog — Mon, 04 Dec 2006 09:30:38 GMT

Last week we released Service Pack 2 (SP2) for Office System 2003. This includes OneNote 2003. Although