Sharing OneNote
October 9, 2008 – 01:47Well I’m using OneNote 2007 from Microsoft to organize a ton of data. OneNote is basically an organizer, or a virtual notebook. It’s fully searchable, very reliable, and understands Ink technology. It will also handle voice recording, and have a GREAT feature list. I think that this app is second only to Outlook.
My problem with it is that I use a desktop for some things, and a tablet/convertible for my communications and of course, for packing around. I need the information synced on both machines.
Using Hamachi and a network share is not always reliable. It works, just not really smoothly or well.
I’ve been playing with some of the “remote storage” solutions for a while now, like Microsoft’s SkyDrive and DropBox.
DropBox so far is the winner. You can either get invited by a current user or sign up for a free account. You get 2 Gigabytes of storage for free, and can buy more at any time. It uses SSL, and seems to be nice and safe. I actually found DropBox because of this article on WebWorker Daily.
Create your account and link the computers that you want to share the OneNote notebook with. In your Documents folder, you will find a DropBox folder. Save your new notebook in there. DropBox will auto sync it to it’s great server in the sky, and it’s transparently shared.
Open OneNote on your other computers, and open the notebook that has magically appeared in your DropBox folder.
Some questions that you might want answered?
OneNote automatically saves your key press information. You don’t have to save your notebook.
OneNote is also designed for this type of sync. It’s aware of sharing between multiple computers and works. Even with OneNote open on both systems at the same time.
OneNote thru DropBox doesn’t care if you are connected. It maintains a local copy and only tries to sync up when it can connect.
Slick, transparent, and easy.
4 Responses to “Sharing OneNote”
Hi Joey,
When you access the notebook you’re sharing do you open it as a local file, or as a network file?
i.e. if your pc is called pc, then local would be opening it as
c:\notebooks\fred.one
You can fool OneNote into thinking it’s a remote file by turning on file sharing and opening it as
\\pc\notebooks\fred.com
I’m wondering if using one or the other method makes for the combination of dropbox sync and onenote sync any more reliable.
By andybryant on May 8, 2009
Sorry for the late reply, I was moving.
I access the shared notebook “locally” from the regular open notebook menu, and I let dropbox do all of the syncing. after experimenting it looks like that using the \\pc\url thing is just an extra step and doesn’t do anything for me but take a couple extra seconds.
Were you having some kind of problem with my method?
By joey on May 26, 2009