I'm having a Sharpen the Saw weekend, mostly installing and configuring an array of Microsoft 2007 products, such as Office, Project, and Visio.
OneNote 2007 is one application I never gave much thought about, until now. I decided to install and give this application a try, and to my surprise, found it very useful.
The best way to describe OneNote is "Word on Steroids", except it's not for publishing. There's no Save button. You can click anywhere in a workspace and just start typing or pasting images as notes.
Need to know how much 500 units cost at $95 per product? Just type in 500*95= and OneNote fills in the rest. You can embed task and TODO checkboxes on any page, which are then visible at global scope. Search is pretty powerful too.
I'm still working my way through the features, but I've added a password protected page for all my personal passwords (3DES encrypted), created tabs for all functional areas of business, and sub-pages for individual projects, clients, employees, and partners.
If you use matrices as an organizational or management model, then you'll feel at home with the layout.
As I got further down the path of actually using OneNote, I paused with concern wondering how much memory this application was using (I quit using Outlook and Adobe Acrobat months ago because they had become too bloated). A quick review of my running processes showed that OneNote was only using 42MB. Cool. It can stay.
Finally, I wanted to use my OneNote files from home and work so started reviewing the sharing options. Here's where OneNote, and Microsoft Office products in general, start to show their weakness.
Sharing and collaborating on OneNote notebooks using an internal file network works like a breeze, but my home/office scenario requires sharing these files over the Internet, such as WebDAV or HTTPS connection, neither of which OneNote supports conveniently.
Here's where OneNote could have really delivered a hybrid SaaS experience by offering to host the OneNote files for me on a Microsoft server in the cloud (without assuming I could, or wanted to install SharePoint and manage the server internally).
I ended up solving the file sharing issue using one of our public file servers (SVN), but that's my only real gripe. Overall this is a very powerful application that I suspect will make it's way into my daily array of productivity tools.