• Illustration: Linking Notes in OneNote 2007

With the inclusion of OneNote in several Office 2007 suites, Microsoft's note-taking application is poised for widespread usage. OneNote offers the spontaneity of a pen-and-paper notebook—for example, users never have to save their work—with the benefits of software, such as searchability, import and export, and support for multiple types of input. The 2007 version offers incremental improvements, as well as new features for group collaboration and developers, but remains most useful on portable PCs, particularly Tablet PCs.

A Digital Notebook

Introduced in late 2003 as a stand-alone desktop application in the Office 2003 System, OneNote lets a user enter several different types of data—typed text, "digital ink" handwriting or drawings (on a Tablet PC), audio, or video—and organize this data into a virtual notebook. Microsoft envisions users gathering a wide variety of information into OneNote and then moving this information to other Office applications for editing, sharing, or making formal presentations. Although OneNote works on any PC, it is most useful on laptops, particularly for students and workers in jobs where note-taking is essential.

Unlike word-processing programs, OneNote offers spontaneous data entry—the Windows file system is hidden behind the OneNote interface, so users never need to create a new file or remember a particular filename in order to return to their previous work, and data is automatically saved as it is entered. Compared with a paper notebook, OneNote offers typical software advantages, such as import and export to other applications, keyword search, and more flexible organization (e.g., cut, copy, paste, drag-and-drop).

OneNote 2003 SP1, released in 2005, offered updates such as real-time collaboration on notebook sections, export to Windows SharePoint Services (WSS) team sites, integration with Outlook's meetings function, and support for video.

Improvements in OneNote 2007

OneNote 2007, slated for release in late 2006 as part of the Office 2007 launch, continues the product's incremental technical evolution. The product supports new types of data input, including tables, and integrates better with other Office applications, helping users get information into and out of OneNote more easily. It also includes improvements that will help users organize and retrieve data more effectively and enhanced collaboration and programmability.

Integration and Input

OneNote 2007 offers users new ways to enter and export information, including the following:

• Importing and creating simple tables
• Transferring notes from a PC to OneNote Mobile, a bundled version of OneNote for Windows Mobile devices (previously, only mobile-to-PC transfer was supported)
• Better integration of Outlook tasks with OneNote items marked for follow-up
• Export to any MAPI-compliant e-mail program, including any version of Outlook, Outlook Express, or Lotus Notes mail; the previous version allowed export only to Outlook 2003
• Word documents can be embedded within OneNote notebooks as icons and edited in Word with a click on the icon.

Organization

Because OneNote was designed to hide the Windows file system from users, the first version has some idiosyncrasies that longtime Windows users find confusing: All notebook entries are stored in a single file (with a .one extension) in the My Notebooks folder, and it is impossible to create multiple notebooks—instead, users must subdivide one notebook into sections. This system also increases the risk of data loss—if the .one file is corrupted, all data in OneNote could be lost.

This limitation disappears in OneNote 2007. Users can create as many notebooks as they like and store them anywhere in the file system. In a nod to OneNote's goal of behaving like a paper notebook, it's still possible to navigate between notebooks without using the file system, thanks to a new Notebooks bar in the user interface.

In addition, OneNote 2007 has much better drag-and-drop functionality, and pages within a notebook section can have their own title rather than use the section title.

Cross-Referencing and Retrieval

Several improvements make it easier to find information stored in OneNote 2007 notebooks. Most strikingly, users can now cross-reference notes by creating hyperlinks between two notes; it's also easier to create hyperlinks to files in the file system. (For a screen shot of this feature, see "Linking Notes in OneNote 2007".)

OneNote 2007 uses the Windows Desktop Search engine, included with Windows Vista, to index information as it is entered. Although Windows XP users will therefore have to go through the extra step of downloading the free Windows Desktop Search application (which OneNote prompts them to do whenever they start the program), it offers more comprehensive search results and better performance than the search technology that shipped with OneNote 2003.

OneNote 2007 also uses technology developed by Microsoft Research to enable text-based searches of words or phrases within audio streams (including audio in video recordings) and text within images (such as a scanned business card or an imported image of a document), although these searches provide less reliable results than text searches.

Collaboration

OneNote 2007 users can share notebooks and edit them simultaneously. This feature could be useful for consolidating multiple sets of notes (for example, when several employees are at the same meeting) and allowing team members to have a single location for storing brainstorms and information on a common topic (e.g., notes from a customer meeting, a recording of a presentation to that customer, and Web sites with articles about that customer).

Shared notebooks can be on any computer (a server is not required), and all editing happens in real-time: each connected computer caches a local version of the notebook and then periodically synchronizes that copy with the master. If two users edit the same text, OneNote shows the later edit in a "ghosted" version so that the conflict can be resolved. In practice, Microsoft says, conflicts should be rare because OneNote is used primarily to aggregate information rather than edit it for presentation.

Extensibility

Previous versions of OneNote had very limited APIs, making it hard for developers to extend the product. A new COM API and XML data schema for OneNote 2007 will make it easier to connect it to corporate applications. For instance, OneNote can be connected to a customer relationship management (CRM) system so that notes taken during sales meetings can be automatically added to the CRM record for that customer.

The main improvement is a full import/export API (the previous version was import-only) so that any data that can be created in OneNote can be exported in an XML format whose schema Microsoft has published. Several APIs also enable external applications to perform simple tasks within OneNote, such as creating new pages or navigating to a particular hyperlinked note, and provide a way to add custom buttons to the OneNote interface.

Areas for Improvement

OneNote 2007 still has gaps that will likely be addressed in future releases, such as the following:

No ribbon. OneNote 2007 does not have the new ribbon interface of other Office 2007 applications, such as Word, Excel, and PowerPoint. OneNote managers have said that this omission was simply a result of prioritizing other improvements, such as internal hyperlinks and better search, over the new user interface. The ribbon might appear in future versions of the product, although it's most useful for formatting data—a task that OneNote is not intended for.

Better integration. Unlike earlier versions, OneNote 2007 supports embedded Word documents, although it is still impossible to embed objects from other Office programs, such as a Visio drawing or an Excel spreadsheet, and then open those applications to work on the objects. More generally, there's room for further integration between OneNote and other Office products: for instance, support for embedded Visio objects would help non-Tablet users approximate the drawing features available via the Tablet pen-and-ink interface.

Sorting. One highly requested feature that didn't make it into OneNote 2007 is the ability to sort pages and notebooks alphabetically or by date. Instead, sections must be reorganized manually by dragging and dropping. Automatic sorting will likely be incorporated into future releases.

Pricing and Packaging

Perhaps the most significant change in OneNote 2007 is its inclusion in several editions of the Office 2007 suite. It is still available for US$99 on a stand-alone basis, and is also part of the following Office 2007 editions:

• Home and Student, the lowest-priced version of Office 2007 at US$149, intended for consumers; OneNote replaces Outlook, a critical application for many businesses, which might discourage them from purchasing this version.
• Ultimate, the most comprehensive version available for consumers, with a suggested retail price of US$679 or US$539 as an upgrade from Office 2003 Professional.
• Enterprise, the most comprehensive version of Office 2007 for businesses, which is available only through volume licensing and probably costs more than US$600 at the lowest discount levels. (Microsoft has not released pricing information for Office 2007 Enterprise.)

Note that businesses that have an Enterprise Agreement or Software Assurance upgrade rights on Office 2003 Professional Enterprise Edition (the most comprehensive and expensive edition of Office 2003) will not get an automatic upgrade to Office 2007 Enterprise Edition. Rather, they will get an upgrade to Office 2007 Professional Plus Edition and must pay the difference between the two editions (estimated at between US$100 and US$200) to get Enterprise Edition. Because OneNote is one of the two products that differentiates Enterprise from Professional Plus (Groove is the other), customers in this situation should conduct a thorough evaluation of OneNote 2007 before making their upgrade decision.

Resources

Preview OneNote 2007 and download the beta at www.microsoft.com/office/preview/programs/onenote/highlights.mspx.

New features for developers are detailed in MSDN articles at msdn2.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms406042.aspx and msdn2.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms406044.aspx.

Chris Pratley, a general manager who worked on OneNote 2007, maintains a frequently updated blog at blogs.msdn.com/chris_pratley.