Owen Braun: OneNote 12

OneNote and the Evolution of Productivity Software

2006-01-02T09:23:00Z

OK, that's definitely an overblown title for the level of breadth & depth I'll be hitting here, but it's the proper spirit. Over the holiday I've been thinking about where the computer industry is these days and where it's headed, and in that vein I’m going to take a quick break from introducing new features in OneNote 12 to jot down a few thoughts about OneNote in the context of the ongoing evolution of software. As I see it.

OneNote (then code-named Scribbler) was an interesting project to me when I joined in 2001 because it up-ended the normal software way of doing things: open an application, select a document, do something with it, close the document. (Actually we hadn't designed any of the application yet when I joined, but it was clear that it was going to require a pretty different approach.) Almost all broadly used end-user software works that way, in domains ranging from musical composition to scientific charting to map creation. There have been a number of idea-collection applications over the years, most notably the collection of outliners and mind-mappers, but none of these caught on broadly to the degree that, say, word processors did. E-mail programs and personal information managers, once e-mail came along, were one of the interesting aberrations, because they delivered personal information, and were thus interesting to consult randomly, even when there was no task to do. Along with commerce and information on the Internet, computers started to become useful to have, well, just around for when you might need them. Computer games are similar, and I think it is not a coincidence that both PIMs and games are both invoked with some frequency in design discussions on the OneNote team.

OneNote is very much a child of this latter generation of computing. Stripped of all the naming & marketing you see now, the germ of the OneNote concept for me back when I joined the team was the "add-on pack for your brain" - the thing that remembers your good ideas later, and lets you get back to them more efficiently than your own brain does. This requires a substantial shift in the way of thinking about people use computers, from a task-oriented approach to a much more idiosyncratic "record this idea, then find that other idea for me" approach, which presumes that a computer is nearby and your data is accessible when the idea happens (or the need to find an old idea arises). When you follow this thread through the way that people across widely varying disciplines do their work - students, lawyers, consultants, engineers, salespeople, administrative assistants, etc - that essential idea broadens out into the more mainstream product you see today, connected much more strongly to real-world metaphors like notebooks and paper and to real-world scenarios like meetings and research. But it all threads back to that essential idea of "record information and get back to it later, because I may not remember it".

This required that we throw out a lot of standard software application wisdom. For example, we have no "save" command, despite a bunch of word-processor-like features, because we don't want to risk ever losing something you wrote down. Even the concept of a "document" is OneNote is pretty ill-defined. Many OneNote users have no idea where their OneNote files are stored, whereas very few Word users have that problem, since that knowledge is necessary to find the documents again. None of this was religion posited at the beginning by some specific designer; rather, it flowed naturally out of our analysis of the scenarios and problems we were trying to address. Computers (historically) make you think about files, but people don't. People think about where they put things in more literal terms. We considered radical approaches where there was no organizational system whatsoever - just a soup of facts or pages - but rejected them as the primary approach because most people do not choose to store all their paper documents, statements, etc in a single big stack. It's a natural thing for most people to think in terms of a specific thing living in a specific place. When it doesn't, it can be a little unnerving. (For all you have-no-hierarchy-and-always-search fans out there, we're hip to your point of view, but when you take the population broadly, most people really want both highly efficient search and a "default" hierarchy, so they have a sense that things are put in a particular place where they can go find them again if they can't think of how to search for them.)

E-mail and personal information manager programs like Outlook are interesting because they somewhat magically deliver information to you (once they're set up). It's often not clear where that information is stored, even whether it's on your computer or some distant server. There's no "save" command in the main application, although there generally is one while you're writing an e-mail. In these senses OneNote is similar to them, and they presaged what is increasingly reasonable to demand of all software, thanks to the Internet: that it simply understand who you are and make your information and settings accessible to you, regardless of where you are or what computer you're using. The investments in automatically merging changes from multiple computers, described in Chris' blog about shared notebooks, pave the way for a host of scenarios in which you access your notebooks from multiple computers, or multiple people access common notebooks from their computers. But there's still a lot more for us to do in this area.

Over the long term, the contribution I hope to see OneNote making to mainstream computing is to make computers a tool for collecting your personal information, whatever it is, and delivering it back to you, wherever you happen to be, and whatever kind of computer or device you happen to be using. I also hope to see collaborative computing impacted by our ideas in OneNote 12 about save-less simultaneous editing by multiple users, which is really just an extension of the ideas we developed for the personal scenarios into the collaborative space. In these sense it will be complementary to tools like Outlook, which deliver information from the outside world to you, and document authoring applications, which provide the modern equivalent of a lever for multiplying the impact of your work.

New Extensibility in OneNote 12

2005-12-15T04:14:00Z

Whew, sorry for that extended disappearing act. It turns out things get a little busy around beta 1, especially when combined with holidays and (in my case) my girlfriend Heidi relocating to Seattle.

Anyway today's topic is extensibility. We've taken a pretty measured approach to extensibility in OneNote up to this point, as those of you familiar with our SP1 Import API know. OneNote 12 is a little less measured, in that we now support a full import/export API (meaning that anything you can create in OneNote manually, you can now import and export as XML), a few automation APIs, and the ability to add buttons to OneNote to call into your external solution code. Our main extensibility goals for this release were to make OneNote data accessible programmatically, and to enable simple connectors between OneNote and related business applications (for example, for sales folks can push their OneNote notes directly into a CRM system). The ability to create a variety of new kinds of PowerToys comes along for free :).

The detailed documentation isn't available publicly yet (we're in the process of getting is published on MSDN), but here's a quick rundown of the methods. (If you're a Beta 1 participant, you can download the detailed doc, which contains the full method descriptions as well as some example code, from http://beta.microsoft.com under "Downloads" - just search for "OneNote" on that page.) Note that the mechanism for registering add-ins is still getting finalized, so it isn't listed here.

GetHierarchy, UpdateHierarchy and DeleteHierarchy. Retrieve, add, and delete pieces of the OneNote hierarchy (notebooks, folders, sections, and pages) as XML.
OpenHierarchy and CloseNotebook. Open sections and or open or close notebooks, as though you had used File>Open, Open Notebook, Close Notebook.
CreateNewPage. Add a new page to the end of the current section. You can also accomplish this via UpdateHierarchy (which allows you to add pages at other locations than the end of the section); this method is just provided for convenience, since this is a common operation.
GetPageContent, UpdatePageContent, DeletePageContent and GetBinaryPageContent. Retrieve, update, or delete page content as XML. This handles all kinds of OneNote content, including text, ink, pictures, audio/video, and attached files. A parameter specifies whether to serialize the binary files inline, or return IDs that can be used to retrieve the files individually using GetBinaryPageContent.
SavePageAsMHTML. Returns the contents of a page in MHTML format, exactly as if you clicked File>Save As, and then selected "Current Page" as the scope and "MHTML" as the format. This is a convenience method for getting a reasonably hi-fidelity rendering of the page in a standard format, in case your intent is to display the content or use it in a non-OneNote context.
NavigateTo. Navigates to the object you specify (a section, a page, a paragraph, etc). You specify using the same IDs that are returned by GetHierarchy and GetPageContent. This allows you your add-in to ensure that the user is directed to the appropriate portion of their notes in response to events in the add-in.
GetHyperlinkToObject. Returns a onenote:// hyperlink to the object with the specified ID. Useful for embedding links in other applications or documents that, when clicked, will return the user to this exact object within OneNote.
FindPages. Returns the user's OneNote hierarchy as XML (like GetHierarchy), but only includes pages that match the specified search string. (Search string has same format and options as what you would type into the Find box in OneNote.) An option specifies whether to show the UI of the search running as well. This can be useful for locating a particular note previously created via an add-in.

As you'd expect, OneNote has an expanded XML schema relative to the SimpleImporter API from SP1. Without going into all the details here, sufficed to say there are elements corresponding to all the types of objects in OneNote (notebooks, folders, sections, pages, paragraphs, pictures, ink, attachments, and audio/video recordings). Also note that for now, we just have the COM API. We're be adding a managed wrapper and probably some helper functions for building/parsing OneNote XML as soon as we can, but it may be a little while yet.

As mentioned above, a primary goal is to make OneNote data accessible to external applications and business systems. CRM and Document Management systems are scenarios we've heard about from multiple customers. We hope to enable simple CRM connectors in this release, and potentially simple DM connectors as well, although this one gets a little trickier due to the combination of OneNote's saving strategy (save all changes all the time) and Document Management systems' approach (require checkout, keep version histories). What would be useful for you? What systems would you like to connect OneNote to in your own work?

Personally, I'm also looking forward to a greatly expanded realm of PowerToy possibilities, since it will be possible to add buttons to OneNote, and extract as well as import data. Auto-publish to your blog or web site of choice cannot be far behind. As always, I'd love to hear your thoughts - what do you want to build? What do you think of what we've described so far? What's missing?

Linking related notes together (really)

2005-10-06T05:27:00Z

So the planned segue into this topic in my previous post was buried way up near the top where I said I received a piece of e-mail with a link. That innocuous-sounding statement is glossing over a fair amount of technology. This is the link in question (slightly censored):

onenote:///\\serverdeleted\public\namedeleted\customer%20profile%20presentation\Persona%20Presentation

Ugly, huh? This is the crazy behind-the-scenes version of the link… by the time we ship it will look more like this:

Persona Presentation

The reason for showing you the behind-the-scenes version is mostly so you see the onenote:// at the beginning. This is the technical starting point for a bunch of cool work we did to enable you to link notes together, link into your notes from other applications, and point other people at notes you share with them.

To take a real-world example, recently I've been giving a lot of presentations on OneNote 12 to customers and these generally involve demonstrations of the product. A product demo is a little bit of performance art in the middle of your typical corporate day, and I enjoy them and try to do them well. Which means, to me, not being slick and practiced, but rather making it real - showing something that a makes someone say "wait a minute, I have that problem - you solved my problem!"

To that end, I make considerable use of my "Customer feedback" section while creating demo notes. That section contains all manner of customer information I've accumulated, among which are a few super-high-value pages containing e-mail threads, personal insights, and/or meeting notes where I really "got it" - understood the value of OneNote to a particular customer. These feed directly into my demos.

So when I'm sketching out a demo, I'm often basing it on other information in OneNote, and aching for some way to just stick in a link to that other note. In OneNote 2003, the best you could do - if you were quite clever - was to insert a file:// link to another section. Couldn't get you to the exact page, was difficult to construct, broke if the other thing moved, etc.

In OneNote 12, when you right-click on a page tab, there's a new menu command called "Copy Hyperlink to this Page":

When you select this, OneNote builds a onenote:// hyperlink to the current page and puts it on the clipboard. Then you just navigate to the page where you want to insert the link, paste, and voila - OneNote inserts a nicely formatted friendly link (for example: Linking related notes together).

There are a bunch of technical reasons why it needs to be a onenote:// link, instead of the more common http:// or file:// links - most of which aren't relevant to this discussion. The one that matters here is that this allows the link to point at a specific page, not just a specific section. (There are actually ways to do this with http:// links, but we couldn't go that route for other reasons.) When you click on this link, it instantly jumps you to that page in your notes, scrolled to wherever you were the last time you looked at that page.

Now this is where it gets cool. First, this link works inside or outside of OneNote. You can paste it into a document, click on it, and bam! OneNote opens you to that page. You can even put it into e-mails and web pages - although this gets into a couple of details about sharing, which I'll cover in a moment. Second, if the page that this link points to moves, no sweat - OneNote fill find it again. Third - this is my favorite part, and where the segue at the beginning will start to make sense - these links aren't limited to pages. You can link to anything in OneNote.

Right-click on a section tab in OneNote:

A notebook:

A specific paragraph on a page (or a picture, or an attachment, or an audio recording):

You get the idea.

Now, if you're working in a shared notebook, links can have extra value because they're not just for your reference or convenience - they can call someone else's attention to relevant information that they might otherwise miss. Plus, the ability to link all the way down to a paragraph means that it's really easy to send someone a mail that says "here's the exact thing I'm talking about: link" that will jump them directly to the exact location in the shared notebook.

Additionally, when you send someone a link that's inside a shared notebook, if they don't already have a button for that notebook on their navigation bar (in our parlance, if they don't have that notebook open), then OneNote automatically opens it for them, which means that a button shows up on their navigation bar, the notebook is automatically cached for offline use, indexed for inclusion in searches, etc.

And that feeds into another scenario where we use these links, which is for inviting other people to shared notebooks. There's a new Share menu in OneNote 12, and one of the choices on it is "Send Shared Notebook Link to Others…" which creates an e-mail containing a link to the shared notebook (we also do this for you automatically when you create a shared notebook). All you have to do is fill out the list of recipients and click send. When they receive that mail, all they have to do to "join" the notebook is click on the link. That's it - one click and they're in. (To be fair, I am glossing over the details here of permissions, but most people have an H: drive or shared server for the team's use where the permissions are already set appropriately - so in most cases it will truly be this simple.)

And that's linking in OneNote 12, in a not very small nutshell.

Linking related notes together

2005-10-06T05:02:00Z

I'll get into this subject by way of a great OneNote experience I had today. All of us on the team are using shared notebooks quite a bit these days (Chris blogged about shared notebooks last week). It's an incredibly exciting time. Despite having designed the user experience and talked about the theory of sharing in OneNote for literally years now, you never completely know how a bit of software is going to feel until, finally, you sit down to do some work with it. With your mind on something else. And while I've been using shared notebooks for a while, today I had one of my first experiences where my mind was really on something else.

It started with a piece of mail in my inbox - number 24 or something as I powered through my morning messages. This piece of mail said "please review & send feedback by tomorrow" with a link - a type of mail I get quite often. I clicked on the link, and only dully noticed that it opened up a notebook in OneNote. I started reading, getting my brain into it, and finally started having useful thoughts. Instinctively I reached for an e-mail to send the comments… then sort of woke up and realized that I was looking at a shared notebook. Which I could edit directly. Or simply add comments to. So I started doing that, directly correcting some things and simply adding comments & questions in other places. And then I had that moment you normally have where you think "having reviewed this doc, I need to forward it back to the person who sent it to me, with comments. Let's see, save as, attach, etc…" And realized that I was already done. I could just move on to the next mail.

Few key points about this:

Instead of this being a document, this was a collection of pages, ideas, and collected reference information which, collectively, made up the plan. It was exactly the 90% of context around a document - the rest of the iceberg, of which the document is only the tip - that you normally never get to see. It was as though Michelle (one of our testers, who sent me the mail) took the part of her brain which contained the plan and said, "here you go". If all of this information were in a single Word doc, it would be chaos, but OneNote's sections/pages approach makes the structure & logic apparent at a glance, so it was easy to read and understand. A OneNote notebook is flexible enough to be the place that an individual person puts down their thoughts & plans in rough form, but structured enough to allow others to make sense of it. (It was, by the way, a plan for a set of OneNote customer personas that we're going to role-play over the next few months - lawyers, students, consultants, salespeople, etc).
When I added comments or made revisions, the plan (i.e., Michelle's brain :) was instantly updated. And while I haven't confirmed this with her, I know from our experience to date that when we have the team meeting about this tomorrow, she'll be projecting this notebook up on the wall. So I don't have the anxiety of wondering whether my plan updates made it to her. It's similar to updating a document on a server, except that with a shared notebook I don't have to worry about getting in Michelle's way as I work on it or vice versa. I can leave it sitting open on my machine all night and all of tomorrow, and she won't be frantically trying to find me to close it so she can make the last chances before the meeting.
The notebook saved multiple rounds of e-mail. This really struck me. Using a shared notebook for this cut down on the amount of e-mail I was generating (and going to receive). This is because e-mail, for all its wondrous virtues, is lousy for developing a plan. OneNote turns the concept of e-mail on its head - instead of having a conversation, buried within which is the plan, rough out the plan, and have the conversations inline. Again, if you tried this with a normal document, you'd run constantly afoul of locking out or being locked out by other people - which is normally why people resort to e-mail & attachments.
This is the hardest to convey - there's a strong experiential aspect. OneNote is low-tech in a wonderful way. Want to add a comment? Just click next to the thing you want to comment on and type it. Want to update something? Just click and update it. Want to send the changes back to the other person? Wait - you don't have to. It already happened. Want to know the latest status? Just browse around - if anyone else has made updates, they'll already be there. When you're producing the company's annual report, this obviously isn't what you want - but today, you have to collaborate on everything as though it were the annual report. Vive la alternative.

Hmm. Perhaps I'll end this post here, since haven't gotten to the topic yet, and try again.

A squadron of notebooks

2005-09-23T06:01:00Z

For this first post, I’m going to start with an area that’s foundational to some of the things I’ll be talking about later: the changes to OneNote’s organizational system. Since shipping the first version, we've gotten some great feedback about where the current design shines and doesn't so much, along with many suggestions. We've gotten consistently positive reactions to the basic approach - a digital notebook with colored tab dividers. However, when you have a lot of sections in OneNote, they scroll off the screen and can take a LOT of clicking to get to. There's a drop-down which shows all your sections vertically, but not everyone finds it, and there's no way to keep it open. And folders, which are a way of organizing multiple sections within your notebook, make it a little hard to tell where you are.

One interesting request we've heard with some frequency is support for multiple notebooks (instead of having just one big notebook with structure inside it). This turns out to be one of those requests which, when made of a normal person, causes them to give a normal response (i.e., “OK”), but when made of product designers who have been obsessing over the design for several years, causes them to ask alarming questions about What You Are Really Trying To Accomplish. Which we did for a little while, because we weren’t sure whether this was a functional thing (i.e., “I can’t do X because I need feature Y”) or a concept thing (“I can do X but OneNote’s way is weird”). If you squinted, top-level folders within your notebook were similar to having multiple notebooks. And if we added support for multiple notebooks, would they in turn be contained inside some other new, top-level thing that you took with you? (What do you call a group of notebooks, anyway? "Shelf" or "Filing Cabinet" might be the obvious choices, but I'm sort of partial to "squadron", a word which, based on its sheer oddness, deserves greater usage outside military contexts IMO.)

While we were hearing this request from people trying to organize their personal information in OneNote, we were also talking to a lot of customers who were experimenting with using OneNote to share information between the members of a team. This was not their personal stuff, but separate stuff that was team knowledge – for example, precedents for a case being researched by a team of lawyers. And OneNote’s approach to storing your information – one big “My Notebook” folder on your hard drive – didn’t match the way they wanted to store those separate sets of information either. They not only wanted their personal notes stored in one place and their team notes stored in another, they already had a place to keep team files. (As many teams at many companies do.) We really wanted to really nail this “group notebook” scenario in OneNote 12, so we wanted the user interface to make this separation clear.

Putting this together with the other issues mentioned above, it gradually became clear that multiple notebooks could actually solve a number of user problems at once: (1) they could, obviously, satisfy the folks that just wanted multiple notebooks; (2) they could provide a clear boundary between sections that were shared and those that weren’t; (3) they could make it clearer where you were, relative to folders; and (4) they could cut down on the incidence of long, scrolling lists of sections. The primary downside of multiple notebooks is that they took a little more screen real estate from the page content – but only a little, and for that cost you also got another level of single-click quick access.

In the picture above, you're seeing my actual current set of notebooks in OneNote. I have six (Favorites, OneNote 12, People Management, Personal, Baudboys, and Travel).

The "mini-bar" of notebooks on the left also has an expand button at the top that widens it into a pane showing all your notebooks and all the sections inside of them:

When combined with the drag-drop support we've added in this release, this expanded pane is also great for re-organizing. Drag-drop is now enabled everywhere – you can drag page tabs onto section tabs, section tabs onto notebooks, notebooks above or below other notebooks, sections before or after other sections, pages before or after other pages, etc.

And that’s the basic organizational story in OneNote 12 – you can have multiple notebooks, each of which has its own set of sections, each of which (just like the first version) has its own set of pages. And folders still exist, by the way, to allow additional levels of hierarchy inside notebooks, in case you need them.

Next up... linking related notes together.

Hello

2005-09-23T05:47:00Z

I’m writing this blog to tell you about the next version of OneNote (“OneNote 12”), which is currently under development. For those of you unfamiliar with OneNote, we’re a product in the Microsoft Office family for collecting personal and business info – like a digital notebook. This upcoming release is either our second or our third, depending on whether you count SP1 of our first release, which contained some features as well as bug fixes. But we call it OneNote 12 because Office is on version 12. So select your favorite number among 2, 3, and 12, and that is the version I'll be posting about.

A little about me – I’ve been working on OneNote since it got started. Chris Pratley, who has been blogging about OneNote for a while already, hired me back at the beginning of 2001 to lead the team of program managers (currently Alex, Dan, David, and Olya). We’re the folks (or “folk”) who design the user experience of OneNote and help get it out the door. It’s been a big, fun, noisy, challenging four years. With the occasional slightly inebriated Perseid-shower-gazing event in Las Vegas. (Really just that one time, when we announced OneNote at Comdex.)

There’s a lot of really cool stuff coming in OneNote 12 – enough to fill many posts. So I’m going to try and take things one at a time, so I have time to explain our thinking, and you have a chance to respond. Since this is my first blog, it remains to be seen what my blogsonality will be like. Will I be friendly? Soporific? Illuminating? Not even I know the answer. Let's see what happens.

Looking Good

2005-09-23T05:42:00Z

No flames as yet. Emboldened, in next post, will experiment with actual content.

Testing

2005-09-23T05:37:00Z

Hmmm, first post to my first blog. Dum de dum.