OneNote Rocks

I don’t have anything groundbreaking to say about Microsoft’s OneNote product – just that the product is fantastic, and is slowly spreading across our IT organization.

I first came across it a little over a year ago while living in the Seattle area. All of my Microsoft friends, many of them with tablet PCs, used OneNote to record meeting notes, formal brainstorming sessions, or just to quickly capture notes on a conversation that could then be pushed out in various formats to all those who participated. My copies were always thrown into an email or sent as an html attachment. But as a consultant, I just didn’t make the leap personally, and start using the product.

When I came to my current company almost a year ago and started building a team of project managers, product managers , and business analysts, I started investigating several tools to help us collaborate internally – and more importantly, externally. SharePoint was something we grabbed hold of very quickly, and are in the process of rolling out an entire EPM (project server + process) solution. But after hiring a former MS Program Manager (he came from the security product division), I was reintroduced to OneNote, and very quickly saw the value in expanding it to my entire team.

I now use the product om a daily basis, and keep up with the latest through various blogs, including Chris Pratley’s OneNote Blog and Owen Braun’s OneNote 12. Of course, my good friend John Durant has been touting OneNote since inception – and John was one of the friends (plus Erik Ashby, Lary Cullimore, and others) who introduced me to the technology in the first place.

There are a few items I would like to see OneNote improve, such as integrations with Outlook, so that ToDo/task items automatically transferred to Outlook, and in reverse – tasks items could link back to the relevant OneNote page. That would be a powerful feature, and would further cement my company’s use of the product.

More thoughts later…