The price is certainly right to try OneNote if you’re an Android user: 500 notes will tell you for sure if the app meets your needs. And for many users, it likely will. I say that as a long-time user of OneNote when I used my first Microsoft Tablet PC in 2004. I found OneNote to be a powerful organization tool as I could create different notebooks for different contexts, such as work, personal, blogging ideas, and more.

The full software paired well with my tablet because it supported ink notes, which it would then index for search by using optical character recognition. Such support isn’t available in OneNote for Android, unfortunately, but the mobile app is still quite capable. You can still have different notebooks, each of which can hold text, images, and bulleted lists. Missing however, is a OneNote widget, drawing notes and support for voice notes.

Still, current OneNote users on the PC that also have an Android handset will be happy with the new app. And they should be, because it extends the use of a tool that’s already part of their toolkit. But I don’t see Microsoft gaining many new OneNote customers out of this development. Evernote is widely considered the dominant player here; ironic because eight years ago, it was an up-and-comer against OneNote on tablet PCs.

Instead of embracing one of the fastest growing mobile platforms early on, Microsoft waited until now for Android support. In the company’s defense, it did deliver OneNote for iOS in January of last year. Evernote, and several other similar apps, brought wide-spread support for multiple mobile platforms far quicker and unless a specific app has a killer feature, I’ll opt for cross-platform support every time.

Maybe it’s just me though, since I use multiple devices on various platforms including iOS, Windows Phone (which already has OneNote) and Android. Let me know if you’re ready to move from Evernote on Android, or a similar tool of choice, over to Microsoft OneNote for Android.

As I always say, use the right tool for your tasks; clearly there’s no “right” answer here that applies to everyone. I simply wish Microsoft would have delivered OneNote for Android sooner rather than later as my notes are generally locked up on another platform at this point.

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Once installed, Trails stores the text and images that you clip onto pages that it calls “spreads.” These are viewable in a sidebar  (via View->Sidebar->Trails or a keyboard shortcut). You can create as many spreads in your booklet as you like, and they can be can be set up as one-, two- or three-column pages.

Adding content to your booklet is done via some new Firefox context menu items: As you’re browsing, highlight some text or select an image and right-click to select to add it to your booklet. Before text is added to the spread, it pops up in a window giving you the opportunity to edit it. Content can be deleted and edited after insertion on the page, too. Trails automatically puts the URL a particular snippet or text or image came from below each piece of content on the page, as well as recording the time and date that it was clipped on.

Once your booklet is complete, it can be printed, exported in PDF format or published to the Trails Public Library online.

As a note-taking tool, Trails is nowhere as powerful and flexible as more full-featured, multi-user solutions like Evernote or OneNote.  However, it does fit seamlessly into a Firefox-based workflow, and as the booklets that it creates are nicely-formatted and can be exported as a PDF, it makes for a very easy way to share well-presented research with colleagues or clients.

Trails can be downloaded from the Mozilla Add-Ons repository.

(via ghacks)

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Yesterday, Microsoft launched its first Office app for iOS, a mobile version of the digital notebook application OneNote. If you’ve never heard of it, it may be because you’re using the Mac version of Office, which lacks OneNote, greatly reducing the usability of the iOS app.

Microsoft asserts that “78 million PCs in the U.S. have OneNote,” which, while not the same thing as having 78 million users, is still impressive. But the pool of potential overall Microsoft Office users from Mac and PC is more impressive still. Having tried OneNote, I’d suggest it may be the “practice” Office iOS app for Microsoft, before the team attempts to bring in that larger user base through Word, Excel, and PowerPoint apps. But unfortunately that “practice” feel doesn’t help the OneNote succeed as an app in and of itself.

OneNote requires an active Windows Live account to work at all. A Windows Live account allows automatic syncing between OneNote on an iOS device and Windows Live SkyDrive, which then can be synced with OneNote in Office (which, remember, is only available in the Windows version). There are no other way (like email) by which to send notes from an iOS device to a Mac or PC, so cross easy syncing off your list with OneNote.

After logging in once to Windows Live, the admittedly gorgeous OneNote Home screen appears, but looks can be deceiving. On the left, the Home screen shows a list of “notebooks,” which act as directories for your notes. Unfortunately, you can’t create notebooks in OneNote for iOS. You must use OneNote in Office, or use the OneNote web app at windowslive.com. On the left are the contents of the Day-to-Day notebook broken down into sections. Think of sections as those little colored tabs on pages you might divide a physical notebook with. You can’t create or modify these in OneNote for iOS, either.

OneNote does perform well when it comes to actually taking notes, though. While OneNote can be used in landscape mode, you won’t have much screen real estate to keep track of what you’re doing. OneNote works much better, and looks just great, in portrait mode. As seen above, OneNote has options for both bullet lists and checkbox lists, as well as integration with the iPhone camera. The camera option is especially nice, as you can take a picture and have that be the subject of its own note. Apple needs to “borrow” that feature for Notes in iOS 5.

Unfortunately, even note taking in OneNote can at times be frustrating. Wouldn’t it be great if those ring binders on the left of the note indicated a potential action, like turning a page for the next or previous note? Instead, the only way you can get to different notes is by forever going back and forth through lists.

OneNote for iOS is free, for now, but Microsoft makes no promises about the future. If you want to be help encourage Microsoft to develop Office apps for iOS, get it now. If you want a full-featured notes app that really works, there’s Evernote. It’s free, but the premium service at $45 per year significantly increases what the app can do. For Mac users with limited needs, especially those with MobileMe, Apple’s Notes remains the best basic note-taking app. As for OneNote, for now it’s little more than an extension of the Windows application, better for viewing notes than actually creating, organizing, and sharing thoughts.

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Until adopting the blogger lifestyle full time, I was a consultant. Specifically, I was a consulting geophysicist for years, working in a highly technical field that depended very heavily on sophisticated computing technology. I regularly used computing clusters with over 10,000 Intel CPUs, so you get my drift.

This morning I received a call from a former client, who needed some specific technical information about a project I handled back in the day. I have been removed from this work for two years, so needless to say I had no idea how to answer his query. I told him I’d have to research it and get back to him. I suspect he figured it would be a good while, if ever, that he heard back from me with his needed information. He was stunned when I called him five minutes later.

When I was working as a consultant, one of my main tools was OneNote on a Microsoft Windows Tablet PC. I used this to handle all meetings I attended by jotting notes on the slate with the Tablet pen. I would immediately grab the Tablet when I made or received a phone call, as having good project notes was critical to my work. I worked this way for years, and accumulated thousands of pages of ink notes in OneNote. It was the only way I could keep on top of things back then.

After receiving the call this morning I fired up OneNote and entered a search term, “Jericho,” in the search box. This was the project codename my friend was asking me about. In less than 30 seconds, OneNote found exactly what I was looking for.

Notice how the handwritten word “Jericho” is highlighted yellow? That’s how OneNote indicated this matched my search term. Notice how bad that handwriting is? And yet it still knew what I had written. It had returned every single time I wrote the word Jericho in my notes, and this was high up the list as it was one of the first notes chronologically. That was important as my friend also needed to know if I could tell him when this initial project meeting took place. It was right there on the note page.

Think about that for a minute. As you can see, I was able to lay my hands on the actual meeting notes taken over three years ago. Can you go to the drawer or shelf where you keep all of your Moleskine journals or legal pads containing past notes and find anything from three years ago? Much less exactly what you’re looking for in just a minute?

This is empowering technology, and it’s a shame it is not more widely used. Most people I show this capability to are completely blown away that it exists, and yet they knew nothing about it. It is not hard to see how useful this capability can be, to almost everyone. The ability to search anyone’s handwriting, and figure out what they wrote is applicable in a bushel of situations.

My fellow Tablet PC enthusiast friends are smiling now, as they’ve been using this for years. But they are the only ones, and there’s not that many of them. That is simply a shame, given how good this technology is.

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Note taking can be a personal exercise. Look around any conference table today and you’ll see a wide spectrum of note taking techniques, ranging from people writing on paper to folks tapping away at laptop keyboards.

But the notes themselves are also often quite personal. For example, when I go into a client meeting, I am there from a technical documentation standpoint, and my notes reflect that. Likewise, I would expect not to get much from the notes of a programmer. The result is that “knowledge islands” can form as everyone hoards their own notes.

Applications like OneNote, Evernote and WikiTouch offer collaborative note taking features, enabling teams to access each others’ notes for collaboration, and help distribute that knowledge within an organization by capturing meeting, research and project notes in a centrally accessible location.

Here are some tips for implementing collaborative note taking on your project team:

• Define the benefits. Moving your team to a collaborative note taking platform shouldn’t be a cause for more work, especially if note taking is already an integral element in your work. It is important to communicate the benefits of the move to the entire team. Is it to capture important project information like requirements? Is it to better document decisions? Is meeting and research information falling through gaps?
• Choose the appropriate application. Moving your team to a standard platform for note taking shouldn’t be a daunting task. However, you need to factor in team member note taking styles and security considerations into the decision. If your organization is hesitant about keeping private notes in the cloud then I suggest taking a look at OneNote, which enables you to keep your note taking and collaboration inside the firewall. If the cloud is OK, then Evernote or Evernote Premium (with its SSL security encryption) would also be an option.
• Set note taking guidelines. Moving note taking to a collaborative app may require some initial guidelines to enable a seamless transition. Depending on your needs, your note taking guidelines may include templates to use (OneNote includes note taking templates), and directions about things like the use of fonts, numbering and bullet points. The aim of your guidelines should be to ensure some consistency across the notes your team takes. The end goal is to have a repository of notes that is accessible and understandable to all those on the project team.
• Set note taking roles. While collaborative note taking removes the need for a single “scribe” to take meeting notes, I might recommend that you still pay some attention to note taking roles when moving to a collaborative note taking environment. For example, you may want to make sure that project related notes are recorded by the project manager.

Do you use collaborative note taking on any of your projects? Share your experience below.

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Photo by stock.xchng user wagg66.

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This post is going to deep dive into some of the new enhancements you will enjoy when OneNote 2010 is publicly available.

Improved Ribbon. OneNote 2010 really benefits from the ribbon improvements in Office 2010. While the introduction of the Office ribbon drew some slings and arrows from long time Office users, the Office 2010 ribbon is greatly improved and smoothes over some of those rough edges.

Tagging. While previous OneNote versions always garnered praise for usability and organization options, OneNote 2010 adds tagging to the “Home” ribbon. You have the option to tag your important notes with predefined tags or ones you create yourself. This new option really complements the already strong organizational capabilities of OneNote notebooks.

Sharing Tools. OneNote gained its popularity as a note-taking and research tool. OneNote 2010 includes sharing tools to make it an even more effective for research, including the capability to email OneNote pages, support for multiple authors sharing notebooks, and page versioning. With OneNote 2010 due to be available in more editions of Microsoft Office, both geographically dispersed and traditional project teams should be able to take advantage of OneNote collaboration.

Improved Drawing Tools. While I am a big OneNote user, I still rely on an old school yellow legal pad and pen for taking notes in meetings. The reason is that my work as a technical writer means I do a lot of drawing of process flow diagrams and such. The OneNote 2010 drawing tools offer the drawing options I need so I can finally leave my yellow legal pad and pen behind.

Audio Tools. While you can’t escape client meetings, you now have the option to record meetings directly into OneNote (provided your laptop has a microphone) and then search through the audio files later.

Office Integration. When I first read the news about OneNote joining the Microsoft Office suite proper, my hope was for better OneNote/Office application integration: the upcoming Office 2010 is working to deliver on it. While I try to keep my expectations simple, I am already enjoying the Linked Notes feature, which enables you to keep notes on saved documents. There is also the capability to send OneNote pages directly to Microsoft Word. I was also excited to see the capability to attach documents to OneNote pages because I can see me using it to attach drafts, research and other project artifacts to keep my projects better organized.

Final Thoughts
While the Web Component of OneNote 2010 isn’t available for review yet, I see it as an addition could directly challenge Evernote and should drive innovation in the note-taking market. Additionally, just as Microsoft is bringing Outlook to OS X, expectations are going to rise that access to Microsoft needs to make OneNote available on the Mac.

OneNote 2010 is a standout in the Office 2010 Technical Preview and I look forward to seeing the final version.

Have you tried out OneNote 2010 Technical Preview?

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Here are some of my favorite OneNote resources that I’ve flagged recently:

Microsoft Office Online tips us to a great demo of how to Take OneNote to class.

jkOnTheRun shares a great user contributed OneNote 2009 Day Planner. I’ve downloaded it and it’s very well done – Nice work David

7Breaths with a phenomenal GTD OneNote implementation (via Lifehacker)

OneNote Tips & Tricks on Outlining in OneNote

Don’t have OneNote but want to give it a try? Microsoft offers a free trial

And finally, I love our WWD readers.  One discovered DropBox through our review and then goes on to use it for great things, like to share his OneNote notebooks on multiple machines. I’m now doing this as well and it works brilliantly.

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Given that Microsoft isn’t talking about when the suite might be released, why the announcement today? The company says it’s because the Office apps are part of its larger shift to the cloud announced with Azure. But it’s also coming relatively late to the game and has let efforts in the productivity space by others go by unchallenged.

In a pre-announcement briefing Monday, Microsoft senior director of Information Worker Group Communications Janice Kapner said Google’s desktop apps weren’t a serious threat to Office and denied that its browser-based Office suite is a response to other online productivity software like Google Docs, which has a relatively small market share. But the advance announcement suggests the company wants to staunch even the smallest flow of current and potential future customers to alternative products.

Microsoft still needs to find ways to monetize the shift to a multi-device, increasingly web-based world, and a nimble web-based Office suite would be a good step in that direction. That might prevent users shifting loyalties to potential competitors like Google. The new suite will, the company says, allow users to move seamlessly between the desktop and the cloud versions of the Office software. That hybrid web-desktop mode is something Microsoft says underscores the Windows Azure cloud platform it announced Monday.

Microsoft was tight-lipped about pricing but said the suite will be a “lightweight” version of its client-based cousin and will be offered as a package rather than siloed and sold individually.

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