OneNote for Meetings
Update, November 2021: This blog was first published in two parts as part of my “Adventures in a Paperless Office” series in March 2013. Reviewing in 2021, it is clear how far this technology has moved on in the last eight years, but this certainly highlights the long-term journey the Microsoft has taken in developing and improving the cloud features in the Office suite.
Microsoft OneNote seems to be a very undervalued part of the Office suite, with even high-level Office users often looking at you blankly when you mention it. It provides a notebook like interface for storing handwritten notes alongside other types of media; but it probably more reasonably likened to a digital replacement for your shelf of folders or a filing cabinet than focusing on a single notebook.
The most important factors in OneNote's usefulness for me are its capabilities around collaboration, particularly within the confines of the corporate network. It seamlessly works online or offline, automatically synchronizing back to a shared location, or SharePoint, when this is available. This immediately creates possibilities for more flexible working locations than any paper-based system ever could.
Setting Up a Notebook Library on SharePoint
We are in the process of strategically adopting SharePoint as the center of our information management rather than existing shared drives. For this reason, I decided to establish my route to sharing OneNote notebooks as a library on SharePoint rather than a shared drive. However, my understanding is that either solution would work equally well, and in OneNote 2013 you also have the option of SkyDrive (though this isn't an option in my environment due to data security).
In SharePoint 2010, setting up a new library with a default content-type of a OneNote 2010 Notebook is very straightforward, so long as you have Design privileges on the SharePoint site.
Click on Site Actions and select New Document Library
Enter a name and description for the Document Library, I called mine "Notebook Library"
Select the Document Template of Microsoft OneNote 2010 Notebook
I suggest not turning on versioning. I haven't tried this myself, but I suspect that you would end up with a huge amount of data relating to every edit due to the constant syncing between OneNote and SharePoint. OneNote is pretty good at keeping track of edits itself, listing new content by user.
Create a new OneNote 2010 Notebook and open it in OneNote.
I have set up unique permissions on each of my notebooks as they are shared in different ways. I have two personal notebooks, one a "Private" one that only I have access to and one "Shared" which both I and the administrative staff who support me have access to. I have also set up specific shared notebooks, for example one for my departmental management team.
Organizing OneNote for Meetings
My "Shared" notebook is the one that has been most customized to manage meetings effectively as this is the one shared with the staff who support me in managing my diary and the papers and other items I have for my daily work.
It was extremely important that the solution in OneNote followed existing working processes that operate well with paper and don't provide a steep learning curve for any of the staff involved. This was not established a personal solution for me but one that can work as a standard across an organization and be supported by staff with different levels of familiarity with digital alternatives to paper - a key difference from most of the solutions I have found online.
For anything that appears in my diary it will fall into one of three categories:
An activity just involving me, there to help preserve time to complete a project for example.
An activity that I set up involving others.
An activity that someone else has set up and I have been invited to.
The second and third category will generally have some information attached to them that would be useful to have whilst at the meeting or seminar.
We have created a section group called "Daily meetings" where all of the information related to diary activities is stored. Under that section group are 31 further section groups numbered 1-31, relating to the days of the month. This follows the convention that has already existed for monthly paper files used by administrative staff in my organization.
Assuming I am invited to a meeting on 3rd January 2013, a new section will be created under section group 3 (3rd Jan), the naming convention we are using is "YY-MM-DD Name of activity". Once the section is created, adding the basic information to that section is as simple as clicking the OneNote button on the ribbon in Outlook when the relevant activity is open.
For most meetings, I end up with a page that shows the agenda, one for the minutes of the last meeting and perhaps a couple for papers. Some serviced meetings are already stored in their own Meeting Workspace on SharePoint, so I might just end up with a page with a link back to SharePoint (fine when on Wi-Fi inside the corporate network).
Following the meeting, the administration staff will either carry items forward within the 1-31 sections or file the outputs of the meeting appropriately. That is probably better off being the topic of another post.
Using OneNote in Meetings
Using OneNote has really quickly had an impact my preparation, contribution and follow-up at the meetings I attend. For someone who has never been particularly organized either with paperwork prior to attending nor with filing notes afterwards, this new way of doing things has proved of real benefit.
Firstly, having access to everything I need on the tablet has really freed me from tasks that could previously only be completed at my desk. When I get a few minutes between meetings out and about during the day, I can open OneNote, start reading papers for future activities and taking notes for myself or others. Previously I'd either only have access to what I was carrying, or if I wanted to find the digital copy of what I had already printed or was due to print would have to search through either Outlook or find the relevant SharePoint site for that meeting. This makes those unexpected free moments truly productive and means that scheduled time at my desk can be used to carry out the task I had actually scheduled that time for.
When attending a meeting, I generally use the convertible tablet in tablet mode with a stylus for input. I feel that in most cases an open laptop is a barrier and typing is a distraction. Writing on screen is more natural in these scenarios and more accepted by colleagues or customers alike.
One of the true benefits of OneNote (and something that makes it really easy to sell to habitual notetakers) is its handwriting recognition. I have really poor handwriting, but a good 70-80% of the time it understands what I'm writing. I don't bother converting my writing to text, but this is extremely useful for search. Remember a couple of points you wrote on a page, and you can search for those and find that page. I challenge even the most organized person to do this as effectively with a series of paper notebooks!
The ability to switch pen colors, use highlighters and tag also make using notes really easy. In my position I cannot really walk around with a pencil case full of different colored pens and highlighters, but with OneNote I can prettify my page as much as I like without anyone else in the room even noticing.
Lastly, the ability to collaborate there and then is really important. The most efficient way to do a lot of things is just to do them, but the traditional route has been to take notes, then to deal with these notes when back in the office. But with OneNote you can clip the content of an agenda, or some papers, attach your notes and drop them into an email instantly. You can even create tasks to do later.
Of course, there is a significant learning curve for the user to use all of these features effectively. Even getting used to using a stylus and writing on a screen is pretty hard and may never be totally ideal for the most prolific note takers.
Conclusions and Future
I am four weeks into using this solution on a daily basis and taking no paper to my meetings at all. For the most part this works well, with the only exception being an appointment that was added into my diary quite late in the day in a location where there was no wi-fi. In the end I pulled down a number of documents from SharePoint onto my iPhone, which was less than ideal, but an unusual situation.
OneNote takes a fair bit of getting used to, both in terms of handwriting on screen and best understanding its features and foibles (for example, it is actually quite hard to write notes over the top of a document printed into OneNote as it keeps thinking you are using the stylus to select the image rather than to write).
One of the biggest challenges is that this solution is pretty much tied to using a Windows tablet as the freeware OneNote apps for both Android and iOS have nowhere near the functionality or "corporate" collaborative capability that the full-fledged Windows desktop version has. If these was a suitable client program for a Google Nexus 10 or an iPad, I believe that this would truly be a killer solution.
There is light at the end of the tunnel though, as there are a number of non-Microsoft notetaking applications that promise OneNote compatibility. One is even promising an enterprise version that can interface with SharePoint.
I hope to get my hands on a tester of one of these solutions in the coming weeks and will report back on my experiences.
Title photo by Alejandro Escamilla on Unsplash
