Virtualization, Cloud, Infrastructure and all that stuff in-between

Microsoft OneNote is my favorite Microsoft product – I’ve used it for a couple of years now and it’s almost totally replaced my need to lug around hardback notepads.

I say almost as sometimes I still need to scribble down some diagrams, something that doesn’t work well with OneNote unless you have a Tablet PC, that said it’s easy to scan diagrams into OneNote with a scanner and keep a record and takes away all the concerns with loosing a paper notebook or not having it with you.

I work disconnected from our corporate network for most of the day but OneNote allows me to host a shared notebook on a SharePoint site which is accessible over SSL I can work on a local sync’d copy and I can make it sync with the server held copy.

It’s useful for sharing notes with my co-workers on a project – it’s essentially a Wiki like tool with good off-line capability.

I would like to see better support for drawing with a non-tablet PC and having it properly anchor scribbles over bits of text – but maybe that’s just me not working it correctly as when I move the text block my scribble over the top doesn’t move.

Anyways – the team have posted some useful Power Toys for OneNote which I will definitley be looking into..

Available from http://blogs.msdn.com/johnguin/archive/2008/01/17/a-summary-of-the-onenote-powertoys-from-the-test-team-for-2007.aspx

More OneNote goodness here http://blogs.msdn.com/chris_pratley/default.aspx 

and  http://blogs.msdn.com/descapa/archive/2008/01/04/blog-roundup-for-dec-2007.aspx

and http://stevepietrekweblog.wordpress.com/2008/01/17/links-1172008/

Microsoft really don’t push/promote this product enough.. it’s great, everyone I show it to ends up using it; as Chris point’s out here it spreads virally between you show it to!

You can even use it to manage cooking Christmas dinner (…maybe I’ll blog about how I did that one day…:))