OneNote team continues to explain

One of the things I like best about OneNote is that the development ad product management team explain (or at least summarise) the decision process they have gone through for major features and then explain how they expect these features and related features to be used.  This not only benefits us,  but also provides them with valuable feedback.  Done early enough in the process it means that the users have the chance to get involved in the design process, and I like this idea a lot.  In fact I like it so much that I want to start using it more within the company I work for,  here’s hoping I can pull it off.

Anyway back to OneNote here are two examples, first an explanation of multiple notebooks:

While we were hearing this request from people trying to organise their personal information in OneNote, we were also talking to a lot of customers who were experimenting with using OneNote to share information between the members of a team. This was not their personal stuff, but separate stuff that was team knowledge – for example, precedents for a case being researched by a team of lawyers. And OneNote’s approach to storing your information – one big “My Notebook” folder on your hard drive – didn’t match the way they wanted to store those separate sets of information either. They not only wanted their personal notes stored in one place and their team notes stored in another, they already had a place to keep team files. (As many teams at many companies do.) We really wanted to really nail this “group notebook” scenario in OneNote 12, so we wanted the user interface to make this separation clear.

and an explanation of working as a team with shared notebooks:

With a shared notebook:

• You can work by yourself or with others – it is asynchronous
• You can come and go as you please – there is no “session” to reconnect to, and no duplicated pages when you reconnect
• Everyone can edit at once
• Everyone or anyone can be offline (no net connection) and still edit
• Offline edits are synced and auto-merged with the shared notebook when the user gets back on-line (even several weeks’ worth of changes)
• Changes are automatically propagated to a server and thence to any of the clients involved in the shared notebook
• The contents can be searched instantly since they are cached locally and indexed.
• Team members can be added at any time and their machines will sync up to the latest bits.
• Everything written is tagged with who wrote/modified it and when it was created/modified
• You can query the notebook to show you what was written since you last looked at it – the actual text gets highlighted.
• Creating a shared notebook is as simple as creating a new notebook and picking a file share or SharePoint (or any WebDAV-capable server) for it – we’ll pick a decent default as well if you don’t care. If you make a notebook shared, we’ll offer to send an email invitation to the team members you specify and that’s all there is to it.