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 NEWSOneNote sings Office tune By Ed Scannell November 29, 2002 1:01 pm PT ATTEMPTING TO PUSH the boundaries of its Office suite, Microsoft has detailed plans to tightly couple its emerging OneNote application with Office to serve as a "staging area" for collaborative information sharing.
"In the future, if you capture relatively unstructured information in OneNote and you want to take it to more structured places, like your contact list in Outlook for instance, we will make it easy for users to do [so]. It will be a natural evolution," said Chris Pratley, group program manager of authoring services at Redmond, Wash.-based Microsoft. OneNote Version 1.0, due in mid-2003 at about the same time Office 11 is scheduled to ship, will serve as a way for users to capture a wide variety of rich data types and to share that information on the fly among all Office applications, Pratley said. Offering examples, Pratley said the first version will sport built-in hooks that allow users to e-mail notes via Outlook directly from OneNote, move action items to Outlook tasks, or copy and paste bulleted items directly into Word. Version 1.0, which Microsoft officials have refused to confirm or deny will be bundled into Office 11, will not contain direct support for XML. However it is being designed in a way that can easily support XML applications and data. "We have architected our file structure and our save code to make it easy to export XML files if that is important to users. It should not be that much work to accommodate [XML] in the future," Pratley said. "What we wanted to do with Version 1.0 was to just get it out there with a useful set of features and ... respond to the feedback accordingly," Pratley said. XML is a unifying technology that Microsoft is embedding across its Office 11 suite and various server-based architectures. OneNote will run on desktop and laptop systems, in addition to Tablet PCs. Microsoft officials hope the application's capability to combine both ink and text will serve as a selling point for the next-generation Tablet PC, on which Microsoft officials are betting heavily. "The idea was instead of giving users a set of tools designed for final-form documents like Word and PowerPoint, they could have a place to capture a lot of different stuff whether it is hand writing, text, or voice. They could then search it, organize it, or -- as importantly -- not organize it," Pratley said. Working with the SharePoint Portal Server, OneNote users can search and share related documents, hyperlinks, and even small tasks. "SharePoint server is acting like a relay. We can do ... ad hoc asynchronous collaboration pretty nicely," Pratley explained. As part of its ongoing relationship with Microsoft, Groove Networks has the potential to further extend OneNote's sharing and distribution capabilities. But Groove officials said the company does not yet have specific plans to support OneNote in its Workspace product. Groove could add value to notes recorded in OneNote by allowing synchronization to multiple PCs or devices, or by allowing distribution of notes to a business team, said Richard Eckel, vice president of marketing at Groove in Beverly, Mass. "Typically after you take notes you want to share them with yourself [on] another device, or to other members of a business team, or a workgroup. If I am in a meeting taking notes with OneNote and want to share those [notes] with other team members not in the meeting, [with Groove capabilities] as soon as I come online those notes could automatically be distributed to everyone else in a [Groove] shared workspace," Eckel said. Cathleen Moore contributed to this report.  Microsoft sketches out plans for OneNote Application's collaboration features unify Office environment.
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