One thing I realized as I started writing the book (the SharePoint 2007 Disaster Recovery Reference Guide in case you've missed my other posts) was that I was going to be taken a lot of notes and referring to them on a regular basis. While taking notes with pen and paper is still something I do for my job, it doesn't tend to happen with the volume or frequency I understood was going to be needed for this project. For this it was going to be important for me to be able to store a lot of information from a variety of sources (such as files, notes, websites, etc) in a central location where I could categorize, annotate, and discover them easily. Luckily I've installed the Office 2007 Ultimate suite, which includes Microsoft OneNote 2007 (its also available as a standalone purchase or in the Office 2007 Home and Student suite).
Briefly, OneNote 2007 is described by Microsoft as “A digital notebook solution, allowing you to gather notes and information in one place.” I'm not going to go into too much more detail about OneNote's features, suffice it to say that it met all of my needs for the book perfectly. I could store items, group and categorize them efficiently, and make updates and notes as I needed throughout each item. Not to mention the feature I used more than anything else in the tool: search. By the time I was done with the writing process for the book I had well over 15 sections within the OneNote notebook I created for it, and each section had anywhere from 3 to 30 or more pages within in it. Searching through this large amount of data saved me countless hours because I could quickly find the topic or note I was covering and incorporate that information right into my chapter in Word.
The other aspect of OneNote that was perfect for my needs was how it integrates with SharePoint. Just like the other members of the Office 2007 suite, OneNote 2007 notebooks can be uploaded into a SharePoint list as documents. But OneNote behaves (in my opinion) just a little differently than Word or Excel when you hook it up to SharePoint. Using SharePoint with OneNote allowed me to access, read, update, and add to my notes from multiple computers without having to worry about keeping multiple versions in sync or possibly overwriting previous updates. Since I was often working on the book from different locations (at a client site over my lunch break, from my work laptop when I'd take it home, or from my personal home computer) I needed to be able to easily access my data from a central location, but didn't want to have to deal with manually synchronizing my files or downloading new updates. The cool thing is that OneNote 2007 does all this for you.
Here's the crazy part. When I started writing this post, I began to outline the steps necessary to connect a OneNote Notebook to a SharePoint document library to create a shared notebook. Fortunately, I didn't get too far into it, because as I was wrapping things up for the evening I was tweeting w/ @MaryCanady and @MrIsaacabout using OneNote and SharePoint. That's when @danlewisnet pointed out that someone had beaten me to the punch with a post detailing exactly that process. (NOTE: for information Twitter, I highly recommend checking out this post I made last year about Twitter and Joel Oleson's post about 101+ SharePoint people to follow on Twitter)
So I cannot strongly enough encourage you to read this post by the Norwegian Microsoft Consulting Services Information Worker team on their MSDN blog: http://blogs.msdn.com/mcsnoiwb/archive/2008/12/03/onenote-and-sharepoint-the-basics.aspx
It's a great post, showing you exactly how to connect your OneNote notebook to SharePoint. The cool thing is that once you make that connection you can view all your OneNote data within SharePoint, meaning you can apply metadata, search it from your SharePoint site, and share it with anyone else who has access to your document library. Plus, OneNote automatically synchronizes its notebooks with SharePoint once you configure the connection (don't worry, you can configure the timing and frequency of the syncing), so you don't have to manually run it to keep things linked up. Its a great way to keep both an offline and online copy of your data in a collaborative environment, which is my book is a great example of effective SharePoint usage.
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