Microsoft Plays A New Tune With OneNote

Chris Pratley, Microsoft’s Program Manager for OneNote, is very excited.  Not only did his boss, Bill Gates, showcase the new note-taking application for laptops, desktops, and tablet PC’s at his recent COMDEX keynote, Chris is convinced that this is an application that will make many workers’lives easier. 

He didn’t have far to go to convince me.  I’ve been waiting for this kind of application for a very long time.  As Bill Gates suggested in his keynoted, OneNote builds on the tools and features found in Microsoft Office to enhance the way people take notes, often the first step in creating a formal document.

OneNote is no overnight market sensation.  Microsoft conceived of the product towards the end of 2000, when it was thinking about the architecture and features for Office 11, now in its Preview Beta stage.  Office 11 focuses on collaboration. 

OneNote Asks What Do Users Do

But when researchers asked, “What do office workers do now?” they got a somewhat different set of answers.  The list includes going to meetings, reading and creating email (maybe they should have put deleting SPAM at the top of the list?), gathering information, and communicating (not just in email, but also in presentations and reports.

All of these functions are served to some extent today by personal productivity tools, but the tools are not optimized for the way people work – or perhaps, more precisely, for the way they would prefer to work.

Today’s tools are discrete and separate.  Information gathered in one place must be retyped (or found and moved) to be useful in another place.  Many note takers (like me) take their notes on paper because it’s so hard to copy diagrams, make annotations or show relationships in the very linear world of keyboarded text.  Microsoft Research recently found that 91 percent of information workers surveyed regularly take notes; 26 percent of these note-takers transfer handwritten notes into e-mail, and 23 percent admitted they often can’t find the information they’re looking for. 36 percent said they were ready for a better note-taking system.

OneNote Is Different

Microsoft’s OneNote is an interesting combination of features and ideas from nearly twenty years of Word and Office experience and a lot of thinking about what needs to change.

	OneNote lets its users type anywhere on the page or draw with a pen on a tablet or (with some difficulty) with a mouse.  (Pens may be used in the desktop environment, but with limitations on their function; they do not, for instance, have the handwriting recognition included in the Tablet version of the Operating System.)
	Saving occurs automatically. OneNote is like your paper notebook, and it replicates its behavior, right down to opening to the page and cursor point where you last used it.
	Notes can also be recorded in voice, alone or linked to text.  Linked voice notes will move with their text.  (OneNote records at 8Mb per hour, so quite a bit could be recorded on any modern system.)
	Users retain the ability to take their notes in freeform, but to use digital capabilities to organize, search, and share their text.

In OneNote, the screen has a different metaphor than in Microsoft’s Office Suite (or, for that matter, any of its individual applications).  The graphical user interface (GUI) looks like a paper notebook (think of your high school or college days, pre-PC), with its tabbed dividers.  Top tabs offer categories; left-hand tabs permit navigation to folders within these categories.  Labels may be user-defined.  Other forms of navigation are, of course, supported, such as a back button (as in the browser) and a search feature.

Users can save notes by topics (of any number), move them from one topic to another, and never run out of paper!

Any note can be flagged with Standard or Custom labels such as Important or To Do.  Flagged items can then be sorted as a list by page, meeting, topic, etc.

OneNote is compatible with the Microsoft SharePoint Server, which provides access to stored files on the server (later it will also provide access to files replicated onto PC’s).  This means access to Word, PowerPoint and Excel files.  For example, To Do files can be moved to the To Do function in Outlook.

Users are provided with a number of choices:

	Sample stationery is provided, together with a format tool to create and save your own stationery
	Outline formats are offered from a style choices gallery.
	OneNote (unlike Excel) understands that you’d like to see all of something on one page, if possible, so it will try to fit content to the page, zooming down from 100 to 80%, if necessary or using landscape mode.

Bringing OneNote To Market

Microsoft thinks that while the corporate world will find it useful, especially for professionals who attend meetings or perform research, a lot will depend on corporate culture.  They note OneNote has also gotten a strongly positive reception from students and individuals.  To us this suggests that the product should be priced at a relatively low price so that it can be widely adopted and attract a volume audience quickly. 

Microsoft has not yet made pricing or packaging decisions for OneNote.  They intend to offer it as a standalone product, but it might be offered as part of some version(s) of the Office Suite.  The product is expected to be offered as a Beta version in February 2003 and to become generally available in the marketplace in mid-2003.  

 

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