Chris Pratley's Office Labs and OneNote Blog : Sharing

Syncing OneNote 2007 notes across your many PCs

Chris_Pratley — Thu, 08 Jun 2006 09:56:00 GMT

Its an obvious thing. You have two or more PCs that you work with. You want to access all your stuff without having to think about which PC you have it on. You don’t want to have to manually schlep files between the two.

OneNote 2007 provides a way to keep your notes available on all your machines. I'll explain below why using OneNote's Shared Notebooks feature is even better than the many folder syncing tools you can use.

I wrote about this some time ago for OneNote 2003. This is an updated article for OneNote 2007. We actually targeted this scenario for 2007 so it is much improved.

Scenario #1: Two computers at home.
Let's say you have a desktop at home (for serious gaming, uh, I mean work), and recently bought a laptop or tablet that you take with you when you go out for coffee or to school or to meet a client. Maybe you take lecture or meeting notes on your laptop, but do most of your web research and brainstorming using OneNote on your desktop. (it's great that a single copy of OneNote is licensed for two PCs, isn't it?)

Here's how you set up your machines so that you can see the notes on both machines.

Step 1. Use Share/Create Shared Notebook to create each notebook you want.
Step 2. On your laptop, open the links you get in mail. Do this while you are at home on the same network as the desktop.

That's it. OneNote 2007 will cache the notebooks on the laptop. You will be able to edit them at any time even when not at home. If you leave your laptop in your car, you can edit on the desktop too, and when you go to sync up, even if you edited the same pages in the same sections, the changes will sync and you will see them all merged onto the page. In rare cases we will highlight where you did something contradictory (such as changed the wording of a sentence in both places but wrote something different each time). Syncing happens whenever the laptop is on the same network as the desktop (the desktop has to be turned on and not "asleep") and OneNote is running on the laptop.

Here's how easy it is to create a shared notebook for use on two or more machines:

Question I Expect To Be Frequently Asked #1 (QuIET, BeFA#1): Um, I already created a bunch of notebooks on my desktop so how do I share those?

Answer: The wizard doesn’t do any rocket science you can't easily do yourself. All you need to do is make those notebooks accessible to your other machines. If all your notebooks are in My Documents/OneNote Notebooks, you can make them *all* shareable by making "OneNote Notebooks" a shared folder using right click, Sharing and Security..." on that folder. Once that is done, check that you can connect to that folder from your laptop. Next, from OneNote on the laptop, use File/Open Notebook, then select the folder that represents the notebook you want to open (e.g. the "My Lecture Notes" folder in the example above). Repeat that for every notebook. Remember that when using File/Open Notebook, you need to open the containing *folder*, not a file.

Scenario #2: I have a desktop at home and at work, and a laptop from work that I bring home sometimes. How do I keep notes all in sync?

Ok, a little trickier, but here goes. I'll assume for now that you can VPN into your work once in awhile from home, but you can never see your home PC from work.

In this scenario, put the notebooks you want to share on your work PC. Make the folders they go into shared (use the wizard in Scenario #1, or the steps outlined at the end of scenario # for pre-existing notebooks).

For the laptop, open the shared notebooks using File/Open Notebook, and navigate to the location where the notebook folders are. Remember that when using File/Open Notebook, you need to open the containing *folder*, not a file.

For the desktop at home, connect to work via VPN, and do the same thing as you did for your laptop.

Ok, you’re good to go. Remember to VPN into work from home occasionally while OneNote is running to keep your home machine up to date (I leave OneNote running all the time myself).

QuIET, BeFA #2: I want to sync some notes between my home PC and my laptop. Do I have to always connect to work to do this?

Answer: No, just do what is in scenario #1 for those notebooks.

Scenario #3: I have three machines at work. How do I keep them in sync?

You could treat this the same as #1, but a more robust solution would be to use a server since they are always on and often some IT guy is backing them up for you which gives added warm fuzzy feeling.

Use the new notebook wizard, and make sure the third option is selected. When you are asked to provide the location, use a file share you know all your machines can see (at work, we have team file servers for this with names like \\onenote\public). Many companies provide a "P: drive" or public drive just for this sort of thing with paths like "P:/username/files". Use that path. Many other companies are adopting Microsoft's Windows SharePoint Services, or SharePoint Portal Server. This is also a great place to put your notebooks. With Portal Server, try putting the notebooks in the document library in your "My Site".

The nice thing about using a server is it tends to be accessible all the time, whereas laptops and even desktops can go to sleep to save power or otherwise be inaccessible occasionally. Obviously if you have a computer at home it can also hook to this server at work if you VPN into your work network.

Scenario #4. I have a machine at home and one at work, and my spouse has a machine at home and one at work. How can we keep a shared notebook for our family that we can see at any time on all these computers?

I have this exact situation. The solution is to put the notebooks on a server that can be seen by all machines. Since there are multiple firewalls involved it would be tricky to use a server at one of your workplaces (usually it is hard to VPN from one corp network into another).

What I do is use a web site as a "relay server". My ISP provides WebDAV access to directories on my web server. I can use the same wizard as in the above scenarios, but for server location I use a web address like "http://www.mywebsitesURL.com/notebooks". OneNote can sync to web servers that support WebDAV, so all four of the machines can keep in sync with the notes found on that server.

If you run a small business, Microsoft will host SharePoint for you at Office Live. You need to sign up for Live Collaboration or Live Essentials to get WebDAV support.

QuIET, BeFA#3: Hey, why don't I just use Foldershare or SyncToy or Windows Offline Files or Groove or some other nifty file syncing/sharing technology?

Answer: Hey, I won’t stop you. Those technologies work fine and if you aren't having any issues, then great. However, all of them have a problem if you make changes to the same section on two different machines when at least one machine is not connected. When they go to sync, they will tell you that the two files are different and what do you want to do? Keep both (rename one), or delete one? Both of those options are pretty unpleasant as you have to figure out what has changed and manually fix things or you delete some of your work. If you use one of the methods I describe above, you allow OneNote to intelligently merge anything you changed in that section so that you do not see conflict messages like this.

QuIET, BeFA#4: Hey, it seems like this would be really cool if I wanted to invite other people besides myself to be a part of these notebooks…we could all work together in a kind of giant, permanent multi-page, 2D, multimedia whiteboard IM session. Or maybe a super-wiki that works offline for each of us, allows easy editing and formatting, and richer types of data on pages beyond text like pictures, ink, audio, video, embedded files, etc.

Answer: That's not a question, but I completely agree. This is what Shared Notebooks are all about. I wrote about them here, and they are the biggest new thing in OneNote 2007. The new version of OneNote has grown up and become a tool for teams to use in business settings. I was talking with a big oil firm this week about their collaboration needs. They have teams of people with some of the members of each team located in Houston, some in Alaska, and a few of these people go into the field and have no net access for long periods of time so purely web-based solutions are not going to work for them. OneNote is perfect since they can set up a shared notebook as a project binder. Each machine that opens the project binder caches its contents locally for access offline. Anyone can make edits at any time and they are auto-merged for others to see without conflicts when the machine comes online. You can even put project documents such as PDF, Word, PowerPoint, Excel etc onto those note pages and those files replicate to each user. If you want to show the guys in Houston the corrosion on the rig in Alaska, drop photos you took onto the "Inspection" page, annotate them with your comments on the nature of the corrosion (even write on them with a pen too with arrows and circles!), and the whole thing is replicated to the notebook for the Houston team members to review when they want to!

Give sharing a try - you will like it and be amazed by the auto-merging in particular.

OneNote 12 - Working as a team with shared notebooks

Chris_Pratley — Tue, 27 Sep 2005 11:04:00 GMT

First, let me point out that Owen Braun is blogging now. He's the lead program manager on my team responsible for OneNote. He's got a great post up about how we now support multiple notebooks. And he's promising a whole feature on hyperlinks...

Recently I've had some mail from various OneNote users telling me that they are using OneNote for team work - shared sections and folders of notes which every member of the team can read and contribute to, and of course search. I've also been reading blogs like this one. I like this post because sbreck describes exactly the type of scenario we are targeting OneNote 12 at. Of course, he is trying to do it with OneNote 2003, so he has a few issues. It works, but it runs into limits. OneNote 12 has had significant work done to make it a breeze to work in small to medium groups effectively and quickly. Allow me to drone on….

How did we get here?
A lot of people view OneNote as a single-user application designed for personal notes. This is a pretty narrow view of an application we have much grander ambitions for. Of course it is not as narrow as the "it only works on TabletPC" myth (grr), but it's still pretty narrow.

As we started planning OneNote 12 in the summer of 2004, for kicks we dusted off our original vision for it. Right there in black and white in the original vision doc from early 2001 there is a sentence I wrote at the urging of my dev manager to specify what we were NOT going to do in the first release as a guide to the team. It states, "Scribbler [OneNote] will be a single-user application for personal use. Although we intend to make it a multi-user application in the future, our first release will focus on the single user scenario to make sure we get it right".

Our dev team was actually very excited to design into OneNote from the very beginning the ability to treat every page and every little bit of content on a page as a node on a graph that can be modified by any number of user agents. They did not want to make any assumptions in the architecture or the code that required a single user to be doing the modifications to this graph in a particular sequence. So we had to put in a little explicit "Down Boy!" to make sure we stayed focused for the first release.

When we had a chance to do SP1 with a load of features, we enabled real-time multi-user editing of pages. We had already found OneNote a compelling way to enhance meetings - it would be even better if we could all use it together - including people attending by phone. We hooked ourselves up to a convenient peer-to-peer sharing technology that was in every version of Windows we supported: DirectPlay. This is used for multi-player games on LANs, but it also works for note taking apps that work using the same principle of passing changes to the other members in the "game'. I wrote more about this here.

The upshot was that we had a non-trivial multi-user editing surface which could be used in real-time. Multi-user editing of a document is one of those hard problems in computer science. It's been done for simple documents such as text files or pixel-drawing whiteboards, but to do it for something tricky and complex like a OneNote page was novel. I am not aware of any non-research application out there that does this to the degree we do (where any user can edit at once in an unstructured way). There were a few limitations to this approach - namely it was really focused on synchronous multi-user editing (i.e. you are all working together in real-time), so it was not a good candidate for collaboration that lasted more than a few hours.

Another thing we added in SP1 was the ability to open a folder on a file share. We had some customers early on (even before we shipped the final code for the original release) who immediately saw that OneNote was a great place to keep the notes for a team (of, say, lawyers and paralegals) for one or more projects. They had a problem today where only one person could read and access notes and documents at one time with their existing tools, and they needed to move faster. They were quite motivated to make it so each user could see and add to or annotate a shared set of information, such as the case file for a client. It's sort of interesting to have a PDF file in a shared location such as a file share or document management system. More interesting is if you can see the other lawyers' opinions of the various clauses in that contract or brief - written in ink or typed beside the pages, or highlighted passages.

OK, still with me? Here's where OneNote 12 comes in.
OneNote 12 allows something we are tentatively calling "shared notebooks". Other working titles include "Nirvana and you", or "Happiness on a stick". [:)]

With a shared notebook:

You can work by yourself or with others - it is asynchronous

You can come and go as you please - there is no "session" to reconnect to, and no duplicated pages when you reconnect

Everyone can edit at once

Everyone or anyone can be offline (no net connection) and still edit

Offline edits are synced and auto-merged with the shared notebook when the user gets back on-line (even several weeks' worth of changes)

Changes are automatically propagated to a server and thence to any of the clients involved in the shared notebook

The contents can be searched instantly since they are cached locally and indexed.

Team members can be added at any time and their machines will sync up to the latest bits.

Everything written is tagged with who wrote/modified it and when it was created/modified

You can query the notebook to show you what was written since you last looked at it - the actual text gets highlighted.

Creating a shared notebook is as simple as creating a new notebook and picking a file share or SharePoint (or any WebDAV-capable server) for it - we'll pick a decent default as well if you don't care. If you make a notebook shared, we'll offer to send an email invitation to the team members you specify and that's all there is to it.

Shared notebooks may sound fancy but really they are just the most obvious thing. I can work on page as I would with my private notes. So can you. You can see what I wrote, and vice versa. So can Hans, Reza, Mary and Yuriko. We can continue this way for months if necessary. It's the most natural way to work together. It's like sitting around a big desk with your team and having a space in the middle where there are post-its, documents, notes etc. and you can see what others are doing or have done while you stepped out. There's no barrier to grabbing a doc and commenting on it while some one else writes the conclusion. Or add comments to a post-it note already on the desk while someone else is reading it.

Best of all you can go on a trip and take the whole desk with you for reference, make changes, then when you come back through the magic of software your modifications are just merged in with the work that has been going on. (Ok, you can see that the physical metaphor sort of runs out of gas because this is something you really can’t do without software.) In software there's no bumping into each other and holding a paper at an awkward angle while someone else tries to see it. Its also trivial to search and locate anything in the massive archive you can build up - very unlike paper.

Today when a team works together they have a file share or a SharePoint site where they put files. You can browse to that place and see what files are there. You can't see what's in the files without opening them. You can't see what others think about each file. You can’t access these files offline unless you take them offline manually and lock others from editing them to avoid nasty conflicts when you go to put your changes back. All those barriers go away with OneNote 12.

When I try to describe this in words I usually get a few questions:

Won’t this be chaos? No, it won't, because we've done it and it isn't. Just because you don’t have barriers doesn't mean that people go insane and start modifying everything everyone else is working on. What happens is that everyone is able to READ what other people are contributing on different pages, and maybe also comment on it.
Isn't this just a wiki? Yes and No. A wiki is great because of the same sort of thing - everyone can read what others have added and modify it if it is wrong or incomplete. But a wiki still forces you to get a write lock on an article or page unless you want to deal with the risk of it getting modified while you are making your changes. And then merging the changes is a manual process if that happens. And wikis do not support offline - that's a killer benefit and in fact the really hard part. Not to mention that the OneNote writing surface is much richer than a wiki: pictures, annotations, drawings, ink, embedded documents, etc. Wikis are also hard to get a handle on since they can't be "organized". It turns out that having the notebook structure available is very important to show people what is available and how to use the space.
What if I don’t have a server? Any file share including one you make on your own PC will work. Unlike a wiki, the other members do not have to be able to reach your PC in order to work on the shared notes. As long as you are both on the network at the same time periodically the changes will be synced and merged.
Does this mean I can edit a Word document or PowerPoint with other people at the same time? No, we didn't enable this capability in other applications - they weren't designed for it from the ground up like OneNote was. You can of course put a Word doc or PPT file in the shared notebook and it will be replicated to your teammate's machines like any other content. They can edit the file and the changed document will be synced back to all the machines. There's no protection against conflicts though, so be sure no one else is going to modify that document.
Is this based on Groove/LiveMeeting/Office Communicator/SharePoint/Windows offline files? No. All of those technologies more or less work at the file level. From the end-user perspective they move a file around (not SharePoint, which doesn't move files except when you edit/read), just as Shared Notebooks move Word docs (see previous question). Groove does some bandwidth optimization to move only diffs of docs, but this is below the user level. If you have modified a doc in two places you are on your own. None of these technologies will solve a conflict for you that is inside a document. These technologies are not focused on letting several people edit the same content whenever they want to without regard to what others are doing. (note: A partial exception is Groove, which has a few tools that let you make lists with each other, edit discusisons, scrawl on a simple whiteboard, etc and changes to these are merged automatically. But there is no Groove tool yet for collaborating this way on a document surface - basically because it is really hard to do even for one app, let alone generically for arbitraily complex document types. Maybe in the future now that Groove is a part of Microsoft we'll have some cool synergies...) BTW, of course you can host a Shared notebook on a file server or a SharePoint site - OneNote handles the offline caching, syncing, and merging.
Isn't this just going to cause conflicts all over the place? Um, no. The reason is that we have some clever merge smarts and we also get to take advantage of the scenarios OneNote is used for (vs. say Word or PPT). Usually when you sync you have only modified an area no one else has modified, so the merge is straightforward. If you add a page to a section in a shared notebook, it can be easily merged into that section even if others have added or modified other pages. Likewise if you add a picture to a page that others have edited, that can be slipped onto the page without bothering anyone. If you added item 3 to a list of two items and someone else added item 3 as well before they saw your change, we just make one of the items #4 and continue on. If you delete a word and someone else modifies it, we just say that modifying wins over deleting (partly because deleting is easy to do again, but recalling the modification is harder). The only times you actually see a conflict is when there are two content modifications to the same paragraph - maybe I changed "great" to "swell" and you changed it to "awesome". In that case we will pick one winner (the first one to update the master) and then show a ghosted page that indicates where the conflict edit is. In practice this basically doesn’t happen if you are not offline, and even then it is very rare to work on the exact same text in the same paragraph as someone else - you tend to self-police this. And that is more of a Word scenario where you are "polishing" content and wordsmithing it. It's more likely with OneNote that you are just pasting in content from the web or other documents, adding a picture, building you own list, etc.
Do I have to invite others to the shared notebook - or can I just "collaborate with myself"? Bingo! In fact this is the answer to working on two or more machines with OneNote. You can just set your own personal notebook up to be shared and replicated across as many machines as you own. And that's all there is to it.
Ok, how does this really work? Every copy of OneNote12 keeps a local cache of all the notebooks it is aware of. Periodically OneNote looks to see if the server share where the shared notebook is located is available, and if so, is the notebook there (the master) updated since it last checked? If there is an update, OneNote downloads the part that has changed and applies it to its local copy. Likewise if you make a change, we now autosave to the cache (way faster than autosaving directly to the server!). Periodically we try to push up the changes to the server, again just moving the part that has changed if possible. Until we successfully update the master, we keep around a "baseline" which is a version of the master as it appeared when we last synced to it. That way we know what changes to push up, and more importantly we know what to do when the server copy has changed as well. Once a sync completes successfully we update our "baseline" to reflect the new "truth". Obviously if you are offline we can't sync, but you can keep working merrily along and we'll sync everything later.

Ok, that's fine, but what use is this?
There are lots of uses as I've mentioned above. An example for us was when we were trying to get our plans firmed up for the last milestone of development. Usually that process entails putting specification documents on a server and having devs read those docs and make private comments in a non-shared place. We usually try to have at least two separate devs estimate the work to develop the proposed capability to cross check and make sure nothing is missed. The downsides of this process are that no one can see if the devs have started reading the specs or making comments. No one can see the comments. Devs have to ask questions via email or physically locating the PM, and no one else can see those questions.

For our last milestone we used OneNote 12 and created a shared notebook, using several sections but one especially held a page for every proposed feature. We put a table at the top of each page, and embedded the spec document in question. The table also had a place to list the devs, testers, comments, unanswered questions (marked with note flags), etc. Everyone on the team could see the notebook at any time, even on the bus ride home. You could see which devs had started making comments on which spec. Two devs could comment on the same spec at the same time. We could query the whole notebook to see how many unanswered questions there were and what they were.

There were some neat side effects too. For example, previously we used to put these specs out and dev would say they would estimate them. Now we could actually see that they didn’t start estimating them until the following week (with an integrated development team it is gold to know what is really happening, not just what is supposed to be happening). Some PMs took advantage of that knowledge to put up an updated spec that had more detail - something we had been asked not to do in the past as devs had often started estimating the spec unbeknownst to us.

The most amazing thing was that we were done with the whole exercise and had higher faith in its being well executed in a matter of a week - usually it takes a month. This underlines one of the selling points of this approach - it makes your organization more agile. I was talking to a law firm the other day which is interested in OneNote. I asked them why a firm that charges by the hour is interested in time-saving productivity tools? The answer: law firms that engage in litigation are more interested in winning the case than in hourly fees. Anything that allows them to put a case together and move faster than the competition increases their chance of winning. The CIO told me that he learned something from a General when he served with the military: winning is all about not waiting your turn.

Using OneNote on two or more machines

Chris_Pratley — Sat, 25 Jun 2005 10:32:00 GMT

One question I hear pretty often is: "hey, I have two machines with OneNote - how do I keep my notes in sync?" There are a lot of ways to do this. In some ways it depends on what your needs are. After all, what doesn't?

First, be certain that you have Sp1 of OneNote. Use Help/Get Updates to check if you are not sure. SP1 has some adjustments to perform better when using files across multiple machines.

Next, decide if you want to sync all your notes or just have a portion of your notebook available on both machines.

Next decide if you need to have the notes accessible when you do not have access to your network.

Now, here are some typical ways:

Use Windows offline files

With this scheme, you will designate one machine as the "server". The other machine(s) will be the "clients" (there can be more than one client). If you have a laptop and a desktop, either one can be the server. They just have to be able to see each other on your network. When the client gets onto the same network as the server, it will connect and synchronize any files that are different between the two. While it is one the same network, OneNote on the client will work directly against the files on the server. The thing you must avoid with this setup is making changes to the same OneNote section on both the server and the client while the machines are not connected. If you do, there will be a conflict and you will have to manually resolve which file to keep.

On the server machine, make the portion of the notebook you want to share into a shared folder. For example, if you want to sync your entire notebook with a second machine, make the folder "My Notebook" a shared folder (right-click on the folder, choose sharing, etc. Note one gotcha is that you not only have to give yourself read/write access, you also have to give yourself security permissions to access this share. If you don’t know how to do this, consult Windows help.) I should note that of course you can also use an actual server for this, and make both machines clients of that server.

Now, on the "client" machine, connect to that share (e.g. \\mastercomputername\notebook). Now, make that folder available offline. If you don't know how to do this, first read this article: http://support.microsoft.com/kb/307853/. Now, read this article on how to set up OneNote using this method: http://support.microsoft.com/?kbid=831596. Keep in mind that this second article provides the most secure steps to avoid any trouble. Most of the time everything works fine without being religious about closing and manually syncing. Best to follow the steps in the link though if you plan to do this a lot and edit a lot on both machines.

If you have a different sort of setup, such as a desktop at work and at home, plus a laptop you carry between home and office, you can consider some options;

Make the laptop the server. I can't recommend this if you think the laptop will be offline most of the time, since the chance for conflicts gets greater if the time between syncs gets large - you will forget which sections you have modified on which machines. But if you mostly use the laptop, this should be fine
Share only a portion of your notes. For example, pick a folder to share on the laptop and be careful to only modify the notes in there on one machine before syncing. This is good for sections of notes with things like passwords or other rarely changing info.

Use a file syncing program

There are lots of utilities that will sync files between two machines. You can use these to make two folders have identical content when the machines reconnect with each other. This is similar to Windows offline folders. These tools have the same limitations in that you cannot modify the same files (sections) in two places without syncing first. Some of these tools let you pick which file types to synchronize. You can opt to not synchronize the hidden *.onetoc files which OneNote creates in each folder and which hold the information on which sections are open or closed in that folder. If you do not sync those, you can have a different set of sections open on each machine even though the set of *.one files is the same.

Use a "real" server

You can place a single section, multiple sections, or an entire folder (with subfolders) onto a UNC server share (i.e. normal file share using the \\server\share syntax) or multiple sections onto an http:// location that supports WebDAV (http://www.webdav.org/other/faq.html) Typical servers that support WebDAV you might be familiar with are MSN Groups and Windows SharePoint Services, as well as any of the "hard drive in the sky" websites.

For example, I keep one section on my personal website (my hosting service supports WebDAV), and all my machines and my wife's machines point to it. I set this up just by saving the file to the web site (Use File/Save As, then paste the URL of your web site into the Save dialog). This adds to your set of sections a "Shortcut section" tab to the section file which is now on the web site. You can go ahead and delete the original now. Then from every other machine I just did a File/Open and navigated to the web site, and opened the file. Of course each machine needs to have read/write access to the location where the section lives.

The difference with this system over the offline files or file sync approach is that the data always lives on the server. If you cannot see the server, you cannot see the data. Conversely, there is no conflict danger since only one person can change the file at a time. This is a good solution for desktops that are always connected to the internet or your internal network.

Create a shared notebook

What I call a shared notebook here is just a folder share that is accessed from many machines (yours or other people too). It works only with UNC shares. First, set up a share like \\servername\sharednotebook. Now, use File/Open Folder, and open that folder share. That's it. Tell everyone you want to work with to do the same. Do it from all your machines. Now you have a shared OneNote "notebook" that shows up as a folder in your own notebook. You can't take it with you since it lives on the server, but you can work on any section, create new sections, etc and every user sees the same stuff on their machines (in addition to their private notes in other folders). While you work on a section you prevent others from editing it, but after a minute or so of inactivity others will be able to work on it. If you want to hurry that up, you can always right click on the section tab and choose "Allow others to edit".

Let me know how it goes!

OneNote Shared Sessions

Chris_Pratley — Wed, 23 Feb 2005 07:55:00 GMT

It's been awhile since I have had time to update my blog, but it looks like I may be able to spend a little time on it for the next little while. I thought I'd try to do a series of posts on good or clever or original ways to use OneNote. Please feel free to share your stories with me - I LOVE hearing about how people use the product, and I will share the best ones with the team.

In my opinion, one of the cooler features of OneNote 2003 is "Shared Sessions" (this requires you to have Sp1 installed, as I know most of you have done already.)

A shared session is a peer-to-peer shared note-taking experience. "peer-to-peer" means you don't need some fancy server or web site. You just have to have a network where your machine can connect to other machines running OneNote.

You can set up a shared session with as many other people as you want - we have tried over 70 in our testing, but most people do it with 10 or less. It works best on an intranet, but you can also run a shared session over the internet or through firewalls, provided your firewall allows such connections.

The experience is kind of freaky at first - anyone can type or write or paste stuff onto the page(s) being shared, without waiting for other people to save or "pass the baton" or whatever. You just do what you want, and so does everyone else. It is a little like IM, except that instead of a conversation where everything goes one after the other with two or more discussions being jumbled together and the comments disappearing off the top of the screen, you can use the whole page and people can work on their own stuff. It is a little like a giant whiteboard that everyone can stand at and write stuff on, since just like a whiteboard, you spend more time reading what other people write than writing yourself. Plus rather than just handwriting or diagrams, you can type, paste in pictures, charts, graphs, etc. You can also add additional pages at any time, for supporting material, etc.

At first you may think this is just a trick that isn’t really useful, but you have to explore it to see the possibilities. For example, on the OneNote team every week we have a status meeting where development, testing, program management, marketing, user assistance (help, documentation), localization, support, planning, etc. come together to update each other on what is going on. In the "old" days, we'd all sit at a table and go around the room, with each representative saying their bit for 5min or so. The meeting usually took the full scheduled hour, and we often didn't have time for the important discussion after the status where we wanted to talk about what we were going to do. Some people never got to give their status since we got stuck on one topic.

In the "new" world with shared sessions, things are very different. First, one of us sends out a shared session invitation via email. This is easy enough - you just use File/Share with others, then choose to "Start a session…", which offers to share the current page. Click "Start Shared Session", then Invite Participants..., and send that invitation. Within a minute or so, people have joined.

Now, it is good to start with a template of some kind to provide structure. In our case, we have the team logo at the top, then we have sections like this:

Agenda

Dev Status

Test Status

PM Status

Etc.

The meeting organizer can fill in some meeting agenda items that he wants to make sure we discuss. So can others - at any time. This is great to start the meeting with, since everyone can see that there is this set of topics that we need to cover. That helps with pacing the meeting - how many meetings have you been to that ended with the time running out and people saying "But I wanted to talk about X…"?

At the same time, anyone can start to fill in the relevant section for their team. So right before your eyes, all 8 or 10 sections start filling themselves out, like some kind of magic book from Harry Potter. In 3 minutes or so, the entire team status has been entered, and you can read it all there, without waiting for people to verbally repeat all of it. This is so much faster than the old way that even with questions and people clarifying what they have written, the status part of the meeting is usually over in 20min instead of the 60+ min of the old way. In our meeting, the test team brings a whole set of charts such as our bug trends over time, support issues, stability trend, etc. They add a second page for these, and dump them all in there, ready made (copy/Paste from Excel). Each person can read those at their leisure, zoom in, etc. Way better than handouts (Color! Zoom!), and you have a permanent record.

If we adjourned there, we'd have saved time and it would be worth it. But what we find is that we can now use the rest of our shared time to talk strategy, or project management plan, or whatever other burning question that actually needs to be resolved. This makes the whole meeting much more valuable than in the past, since rather than just reporting information we are actually making decisions.

But it gets better. Sometimes one of us is late to the meeting, since they are stuck in some other activity. They arrive, having missed the first 20min. They open the email invitation to the shared session, and in seconds they have all the notes written so far. A quick scan and they are up to speed - now they didn't miss much at all, especially of the status reporting part. Even cooler, a few times I have not been able to make the meeting since I was stuck in some other meeting or conference call where my full attention was not required, so I opened the invitation in that meeting and was able to see what was going on. I was even able to ask questions by typing them on the shared page, even though I wasn't in the room, and was in fact attending a different meeting. "Freaky deaky!", you’re saying.

Now, this bit about not having to be in the room but still being able to see the shared notes, diagrams, charts, etc is key. We sometimes have people attending remotely, from California or Japan. In the old way, these people had to listen to speakerphone. If you've ever done this, you know that it is very hard to listen to a meeting this way, since the people physically in the room forget about you, speak quietly, draw on the whiteboard, etc and you can't follow. Now, with a shared session, you see everything they are drawing, and you also see the summary notes that someone (or multiple people) are capturing in real-time so it is much easier to follow. You can also draw a diagram yourself if necessary or just highlight part of a chart so you are not stuck having to explain your concept in words over the phone.

Ever had the experience of attending a meeting and then finding out later that all the things you discussed and decided were remembered differently by the other people in the room? Another great effect of shared notes is that you have a live record of the meeting that you can verify is accurate and even edit yourself before the meeting ends. That way things are very clear about what was decided, and you don't have to get some "minutes-taker" to understand a clarification you want to make to the notes - just edit it yourself. At the end of the meeting it is easy for everyone to review the written record of decisions made, so there is no confusion.

Wait, it gets even slicker. Sometimes you are in a meeting where you have "sides" (as in Group A is negotiating with Group B). During the meeting, it is really hard for the members of each group to stay in sync regarding their position, since they can't read each others' minds to determine how the others are reacting to new information unveiled at the meeting. But with shared notes you can set up a session just for your "side" of the meeting, and each of you can contribute. If any of you are taking notes, rather than have all five of your team take the same notes just take shared notes so more of you can listen at a time. You are going to have more complete notes with more time to participate yourself. You can also type things like "be sure to ask about X", or "let's be careful not to mention Y" or "what do we think of their plan?" (and get responses). That way you can manage your side's strategy much more effectively. If you are a consultancy, sometimes your client can ask you point blank for your opinions immediately after presenting their situation, and if you disagree with each other in your answers you're going to look silly. Well, just write down your thoughts in the shared notes as the client is presenting their situation to you, and you can be sure to know what all the members of your consultant team are thinking before any of you have to open your mouths.

So those are a few examples of using shared sessions. How are you all using it?