OneNote 2003 SP1 has wrapped
Today we had our ship party for OneNote 2003 SP1 down at Sammamish State Park (at the south end of Lake Sammamish in Issaquah for those who might know the greater Seattle area). Although we have signed off on the code, the process of building a patch, verifying it, and creating international versions continues so you won't see the final SP1 bits for a few more weeks.
Some highlights of SP1 for me (allow me to sing our own praises on this one day, please):
- It is super rock solid stable. The original version of OneNote was pretty darn stable, but for SP1 we have had the chance to collect Watson data for the last 9 months or so and have been able to fix a large % of the crashes and hangs people have seen. We measure "mean time to failure" for OneNote and we are now averaging about 900 hours of execution time between crashes for the original version. That means if you add up all the time that we are running for all users and divide by the number of crashes logged, we get a pretty big number. The numbers for SP1 are still coming in but they are way ahead of the original release for the same pre-ship period, so we should be able to beat 900hours no problem. We are pretty happy with how stable we are - people expect version 1 of an application to be weak in this area and we have not fallen victim to that - quite the opposite.
- We were able to address most of the top user requests - as I have written before, we couldn't do everything, but we did a lot. It is fun to hear people who have not yet used the preview ask for improvements and be able to tell many of them that *everything* they have asked for is already in Sp1.
- Breakthrough experiences, like real-time note sharing. If you're the only person you know who has OneNote, then this is not of much use to you, but if you work with others, such as in a team, it is very powerful. We do our status meetings using this. One of us invites the others to a shared session, then everyone joins and adds their status to the status page - all at the same time. It is freaky to watch, since the whole page is filled in after about 2 min, with text and diagrams appearing all over the place. Then the whole meeting is way faster because you can read the status and not wait for each person to say all of it. Once I had to be at home and had to miss the meeting, and decided to join a shared session that was going on at work. I could see everything everyone else could see who was actually in the room, and could even add comments and ask questions silently by typing them into the shared note surface. Wow - try doing that over just the phone.
- Focus on end users, corporate team scenarios. We took the feedback we got from people not just on bugs but on how they wanted to use the product and tried to make their scenarios work. In particular, we worked with several corporate customers to help make OneNote work as a group collaboration tool, and it shows in the SP. Shared folders, SharePoint integration, real-time sharing, etc are all inspired by working with our “rapid adopter“ corporate customers. Some of these were questioning the value of OneNote to their organizations at first, but now they are enthusiasically embracing it thanks to SP1.
- Big focus on reducing annoyances. Some things are hard to work with such as the “offline files” system in Windows. It is just flaky, and bites OneNote especially hard because we do our constant-save thing. SP1 has improved on this experience tremendously due to the extreme dedication of a few people on the team to tracking down issues and working hard to get clear reproducible steps so the bug can get resolved or a workaroudn devised. Although we couldn’t do a radical overhaul of our ink user experience, the same sort of attention to detail went into tracking down obscure and annoying bugs that users would occasionally report (such as ink jumbling on a page for no apparent reason). We think we’ve managed to exorcise these problems due to a lot of hard work by a couple of people. Similarly, our already solid anti-file corruption code has been tweaked and tuned to the point where we're starting to feel like the Maytag repairman...
- FEATURES FEATURES FEATURES:
- Insert Document as Picture (Word/Excel/PowerPoint/Pictures)
- Shared Sessions – real-time peer-to-peer multi-user sessions (we had over 70 people once)
- Share With Others Pane – e-mail/SharePoint/file share/real-time
- Shared Folders for collaboration with others
- Much better performance with SharePoint
- Password Protection of sections
- Send to/Save as/Publish as Word
- New stationery pane – new stationery too!
- Insert Screen Clipping
- Insert Outlook Meeting Details
- Create Outlook Contact & Appointment
- Insert Date/Time (Ctrl-Shift-F)
- Change date/time on page header
- Names for subpages (they take the first text on the subpage)
- Resizable page tabs (drag page edge)
- Video Recording & linked notes
- Copy text/ink/voice notes from Pocket PC/SmartPhone
- Updated default notebook with out-of-the-box useful structure and "Helpful Tips" section
- Updated online and offline help with top requests (thanks for the on-line feedback!)
- You can specify scope of search before running it (drop-down next to green "go" button)
- Better default notebook structure
- Skip slow sections & folders during search
- 10x perf fixes for Navigation drop-down and clicking on section & folders tabs are all faster
- More note flags (25) and additional symbols
- Tablet improvements
- Added support for scratch-out gesture
- New erasers (including point erase, like a pencil would do)
- Erasing a word in a sentence and rewriting it puts the new word in the right place after converting the sentence to text
- Customizable pens (color, thickness, name, etc)
- You can now double-space your notes without getting a lot of separate containers
- Better ink performance and responsiveness
- Selection tool allows you to grab individual strokes in ink drawings
- Can mark pictures as "background" for use in stationery
- Improved sync support for offline files/Intellimirror
- Can associate different default stationery with each section, create new pages from stationery using split new page button
- Drag/drop files onto OneNote page allows link/copy-and-link/insert as picture
- And loads more little tweaks and nasty things removed...
Now, on to the next version...
Comments
- Anonymous
June 24, 2004
Dat wordt nog wat met Office2003!
Zie ook de InfoPath SP1:(http://blogs.msdn.com/infopath/archive/2004/03/17/91311.aspx">http://blogs.msdn.com/infopath/archive/2004/03/17/91311.aspx)
Op de infopath team blog staan verder nog wat versnipperde artikelen over de nieuwe functionaliteiten.
(http://blogs.msdn.com/infopath) - Anonymous
June 25, 2004
Congrats - great news! - Anonymous
June 25, 2004
Awesome product! Thanks for your hard work! - Anonymous
June 25, 2004
OneNote's a great product, and seeing all the new features available, I can't wait to try SP1. Good work! :) - Anonymous
June 25, 2004
I am so glad to hear about the wrap party! You and the team had a great product to start with and the SP makes it even better. Can't wait to hear where you are going from here! - Anonymous
June 25, 2004
I am glad that you have been working diligently on this product and look foward to using it I know that since you watched what the public wanted and tried to suit there needs then you were going at things where you know that you were going to suceed at. - Anonymous
June 25, 2004
What about the API? Any changes on the import interface? Has it been expanded to include exports as well? - Anonymous
June 25, 2004
Good to know you guys have been looking at that Watson data.
Thanks for probably the best program in a decade. OneNote rocks. - Anonymous
June 26, 2004
In portugal i and lots of people are frustrated because of the innexistence of One Note on every office 2003 package. I and some microsoft partners already contacted ms portugal because of this and they said that we should not even wait for it because they are not even thinking on selling it. In portugal we don't see tablet pcs because of that! i tried the one note (Usa version) and i loved it. Infortunately i tried to install the portuguese dictionary but it only works in the other programs of the office, it don't work in one note :/ - Anonymous
June 26, 2004
D: no changes to the API from the preview except to bump the version to final. Export will have to wait.
Hugo: You're right. Like Visio, Project, etc, OneNote is a separate product from the Office suite. We do have a Portuguese version though - so it should be available in Portugal. The Portuguese version of OneNote is on every Toshiba laptop sold in Portugal, among others. There is no TabletPC for Portuguese yet, but that it not related to OneNote. The Portuguese speller from Office does work with OneNote - maybe you need to set the format of the text in OneNote to have language of Portuguese (Select the text, then Tools/Set language) - Anonymous
June 27, 2004
Are there any plans for adding "Virtual Pages" or "Virtual Folders" (i.e., kinda like rule based Search Folders in Outlook). - Anonymous
June 27, 2004
Frank, I can't comment specifically about features, but that is a sensible idea for OneNote and one we were interested in during the first version too. - Anonymous
June 27, 2004
Hi Chris,
I was wondering if there will ever be support for ink on regular PCs with graphics tablets (like the Wacom Graphire for example). I can use the Writing Pad within Office to convert handwriting to text on the fly, but I can't yet write ink in to OneNote like Tablet PC users can.
Thanks for your time! - Anonymous
June 28, 2004
Well, you can certainly ink in OneNote with a graphics tablet just like you can with a mouse. What you can't do is recognize that ink to text. For that to work there would have to be ink-to-text recognition engines made available in non-Tablet Windows. It's a little more complex than that though - OneNote only works with the new Tablet kind of ink, and although we can capture that ink format on non-tablets, the sample rate is lower when going through the mouse driver (~40/sec), so even if we had the Tablet reco engines somehow, they would not work well since they expect the higher sample rate that Tablets provide (~133/sec). - Anonymous
June 28, 2004
How will I survice the next few weeks? - Anonymous
June 28, 2004
The comment has been removed - Anonymous
June 29, 2004
Ian, the Sp1 preview is a standalone version of the program you can use for a few months, and is not related to your RTM (original) installation. When the final SP1 comes out though, it will be a patch that you apply to your existing RTM version, so you'll need to uninstall the SP1 preview and reinstall your RTM version, then apply the patch.
If this might be a problem for you, I would wait a few weeks until the patch is ready and not bother with Sp1 preview just yet. - Anonymous
June 30, 2004
Chris:
Thanks for a very good. The updated feature list looks very impressive.
Any virtual printer / print-to function like Journal?
Rob Bushway
Tablet PC MVP - Anonymous
June 30, 2004
Yes! Eagerly awaiting print-to functionality an lasso selection... - Anonymous
June 30, 2004
Rob/Andy: yes, Insert Document as pictures prints documents into OneNote. Or, you can print to the Microsoft Office Document Image Writer (in TIF format), then insert that using the same command. - Anonymous
July 01, 2004
:-( ...was looking primarily for that Print To functionality (like many others) which will also let you search the printed document as it exists in OneNote and also will let you print any document, not just MSFT docs. - See GoBinder / PlanPlus / Journal for examples.
You lose that search capability when printing to a .tiff through MODI and Inserting Document; and the Insert Document does not let me print non-microsoft files without first printing to the MODI then saving as a .tiff and then importing that .tiff as document.
Will this one step print-to functionality be coming in a Version 2 of OneNote? It is one of the most requested OneNote features in the at TabletPCBuzz.com. I just have trouble seeing OneNote as a true notebook for me if I can't search the text of documents imported like I can with Journal, etc. I'd settle for a two - three step process if I could search the imported files, but I can't even do that.
http://www.tabletpcbuzz.com/forum/topic.asp?TOPIC_ID=12201&whichpage=7
All of that said, you guys have done a remarkable job and it is much appreciated, especially with it being a free upgrade. - Anonymous
July 01, 2004
Chris, the excitement in your "voice" when writing about OneNote has inspired me to unwrap the copy I got as a freebie at a presentation a while back and install it on my new laptop. I'm going to need to take a lot of notes for various projects in the months to come, on the road and back at the office, and opening up a series of Word documents seems rather klunky in comparison to the wonders you describe.
In fact, I've now downloaded the SP1 preview to both my laptop and desktop, because of the enthusiastic long list of features and bug fixes you've included in this blog entry. I'm hoping I can synch the two documents.
I'm looking forward to this!
One more point - I had some correspondence with a guy whose mission in life seems to be to spread the gospel of OpenOffice, claiming that Microsoft doesn't care about the way their users actually work. I pointed him at your blog and he's been awfully quiet since! - Anonymous
July 03, 2004
Rob, we're all over that for next time.
Peter, thanks for the vote of confidence. I encourage you to:
a) follow the tour that comes with Sp1 - do not skip it. We put a bunch of effort into making that a useful 90sec...
b) check out the online content for OneNote (Help/Office on the web). There's actually a bunch of good stuff there. - Anonymous
July 03, 2004
Does anybody knows if someday it will be ported to a Pocket PC version, let's say "Pocket Notes" and allow to sync between desktop PC and Pocket PC handheld ? - Anonymous
July 04, 2004
Alavaro, OneNote SP1 will allow you to copy notes taken on the PocketPC or SmartPhone (text, ink, voice) into OneNote, and keep those up to date as you add more notes on your device. (this is not two-way sync, and there is no new software for the device - just use the notetaking tools included) - Anonymous
July 06, 2004
One absolutly key feature I was REALLY joping for geting in the SP1 was the ability of the "Search" results to perform as the Noteflags, i.e. create a Page summary. That would be like having UNLIMITED note flags if we create our own special keywords. For example, start the name of each team first name with a "$" sign when his/her name is entered as "delegated to". One example of how it could be used is as the following :: Fill different projects with different tasks to be performed by different team member. Then do a search by keyword such as "$John Doe" across all notes : you get every task delegated to John Doe. Can be sent to John Doe, brought to meetings with team members for review projects status, etc
So, here is the question : will SP1 allow creating summary pages using the search function??? - Anonymous
July 07, 2004
Jay, of course you can get that view by opening the "Page List" pane (or just do a search), but in SP1 you cannot create a summary page of those results. Next time maybe... - Anonymous
July 09, 2004
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July 10, 2004
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July 10, 2004
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July 10, 2004
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July 11, 2004
There's one thing I just don't get with OneNote... how do you save your notes between Windows re-installs?
In Outlook, your outlook.dat file is your life saver. In OneNote, where are the files that you need to save? - Anonymous
July 11, 2004
The comment has been removed - Anonymous
July 11, 2004
Jeffrey, OneNote saves one file per section, and by default these are in My Notebook folder under My Documents. You can copy this folder to a spare drive if you are re-imaging Windows. The actual location of you notebook can be changed in Tools/Options/Open and Save.
Tim, yes, we want to work on capturing web pages WYSIWYG in the future for people who need exact layout. In the meantime, you can try the powertoy "IE2Onenote" (available soon) or print the page to Microsoft Office Document Imager as a TIFF, and insert this in OneNote - a little clunky until the powertoy comes out. Note that the first version of the powertoy will likely just automate the paste, and not handle the imaging. This inserted image will be WYSIWYG, but it is just an image, not text.
BTW, I think OneNote has a lot more to offer than just a place to save web pages. Have you experimented with note flags for example, and the summaries you can create of these? - Anonymous
July 12, 2004
Chris, thanks for the workarounds. It sounds like it's going to be awhile until it works the way I want it to work. I have my own workaround for pasting text (PureText), but it doesn't keep the URL. Inserting an image defeats the purpose of capturing a webpage, I need to search the text.
I haven't used OneNote beyond copying and pasting text and webpages into it. I usually test the basic functionality of a program first before I spend time investigating it's other features. If it doesn't meet my expectations with the basics, I usually move on to another program. However, I've been playing with OneNote more that I usually play with a program because it's made by Microsoft and I know that it really has the potential to be a great program. - Anonymous
July 13, 2004
I'm late here but congrats Chris and team. Y'all done good... I'm running one of the pre-release SP1's and it's been rock solid. - Anonymous
July 13, 2004
I just bought & installed OneNote 2003. Will the SP1 Final be downloadable in July? Thanks. JR - Anonymous
July 14, 2004
Hello Chris, Onenote SP1 preview looks great!
I was just wondering if you guys added the "Insert Objects" that's commonly found on Microsoft Office programs. I am a student and I have recently found the powerful use of the Microsoft Equations Editor. Because math is one of the classes I take notes with, it would be a helpful addition for placing complex equations into my notes. Until then, pasting it in from an instance of Word has been working fine. Thank you!
JM - Anonymous
July 18, 2004
Jacob, "Insert Object" requires support for Object Linking and Embedding (OLE) which OneNote 2003 does not have (nor did we add this major architectural feature in SP1). It's something we're considering though.
James, I can't discuss release dates, sorry. - Anonymous
July 21, 2004
Dear Chris,
we are also happily using SP1 and love the new features (especially the sharing of note sessions). There is already quite a group of users using OneNote at our hospital. Some are very heavy users and have abandoned paper notes completely thanks to OneNote.
Here is our wishlist for SP2:
· Searchable timestamps. We would like to be able to add searchable time stamps to OneNote paragraphs so that to do's coud be labeled with due dates, start dates, etc
· Add Styles
· Clean up copied documents. If you copy a document to your notebook and add a link to it in a OneNote page, the document should be deleted if the link disappears. Otherwise the notebook folders will fill up with documents that are no longer referenced. (Of course if you link to the original document (as of SP1) this should not be deleted when the link disappears).
Alternative: search for documents in de OneNote folders that are no longer referenced, so that the can be cleaned up.
· Multi-word search. Allow search strings with multiple words without the words having to be in the specified order. (Cfr Google). As OneNote notebooks increase in size the single term search becomes a problem.
· Setting of short cut keys. Allow setting of short cut keys by the user as in word. Especially highlighting (and formatting in general) should be short cut enabled since this is something you want to do while typing.
· Sharing notes.
1. Show where another person is typing in your notes.
Sometimes other people are typing in a zone that is currently not visible to you. It might be that you are registering the same content elsewhere on the page. Solutions:
§ If the zone where the other user is typing is visible, temporarily highlight it (preferably semi-transparant, not too conspicious)
§ If off screen
? Show what the other is typing the same way Outlook shows an incoming mail (just 2 lines, semi transparant, right lower corner). If you click on that floating panel you go to where the other is typing
? Show arrows pointing in the direction of the aff screen zone that is being altered (second choice solution)
2. Allow some people to edit and others only to read in a session.
3. Throw somebody off a session
4. If you started a session as a host, allow that person to join other sessions.
· Merge notes option. This is a though one: you share notes and then each annotates and adds them separately. How to merge them again if need be?
· Chat or send a message (outside of the notes) to one of the persons you are sharing a session with). To be able to "talk" off the record.
· Share or sync note flags.
· Links between notes. As notebooks become bigger we should be able to hyperlink from within one page to another (preferably to a place within a page).
? Given the above feature it would be even nicer if the Note Flag Summary Page that can be generated should generate a page with the note flags as links.
· Simple drawing package as in ppt. The drawing tools are only useful when drawing with a pen. Could you add "mouse-drawing" capabilities like the ones in powerpoint. We need the ability to make small business drawings. I guess that the overwhelming majority of users use OneNote on a laptop.
Keep up the good work,
Greetings from Belgium
Mark and Bart - Anonymous
July 22, 2004
Hi Chris,
I am a new user of OneNote and I really like what I see until now. I try to be a diciplined GTD user and use the outlook implematation. Is it possible to put a hyperlink in a task so that when you click on it it will go automatically to the right note page? Must be possible but I do not know how to do it.
Keep up the good work with the blog, tons of usefull information. - Anonymous
July 22, 2004
How does the final SP1 differ from the preview? I've been using the SP1 Preview for some time and it has been quite stable. - Anonymous
July 24, 2004
Mark and Bart, that's awesome feedback. I very much appreciate the detail and thought that went into it, and also it is great to see groups of people already using Shared Sessions, and we haven't even shipped yet! BTW, I realize you called this a list for Sp2, but bear in mind that Sp2, when it shows up, most likely will not be a big fature-rich thing like SP1 - it will be more of a traditional SP. We're busy on the next full version now, and many of your ideas are part of our thinking.
Atilla, You can make a file:// link to a *.one file and put that in Outlook. We like the idea though.
Dan, Sp1 final has even better stability (thank you, Watson), lots more bug fixes, but no new features other than minor tweaks to existing ones. - Anonymous
July 27, 2004
Chris,
Nice job to you and your team on SP1. I just installed it and am playing with it now. Overall it seems snappier than the original and I like the tutorial that is included. Very nice. Rearranging tabs works great. Just waiting on categories... :-) - Anonymous
July 27, 2004
Bart Van den Bosch and Mark Vanautgaerden:
Could you please send me mail privately (use the blog Contact feature) I have a question to ask... Thanks! - Anonymous
July 30, 2004
The comment has been removed - Anonymous
August 01, 2004
Blake, music to my ears. Thanks. To your questions:
1. No, you can only be part of one real-time session at a time in Sp1. (the scenario for Sp1 was attending a meeting in person or remotely, so having more than one going was not seen as necessary and would have added complexity.)
2. syncing - yes, that's a common request. For our first release we chose not to develop a new thing just for OneNote - after all, syncing across machines is something you want to do with all your data. As it is, you have some options:
a. use Windows offline folders. This is much better in Sp2 of WindowsXP and OneNote's Sp1 has also tried to work around some of the issues with offline folders. It seems to work pretty well now.
b. if you think the two machines will often be able to see each other, you can just keep your notes on one machine, share the folder they are in, and point some or all of your notebook (the part you want to share) on the second machine at the shared folder on the first machine. With this method, if the first machine is not available you have no access to those notes (no local cache).You can also set up a share in the other direction: imagine two folders: "My Tablet Notes" and "My Desktop notes". When the machines can see each other both sets of notes are visible on both machines. The nice thing about this is there are never any conflicts
c. use a USB dongle to share your notes manually (just point part of your notebok at the dongle).
d. get a third party tool (e.g. Suresync?) - Anonymous
August 04, 2004
Seriously impressive stuff! That's a looooong feature list, and some of the lines would have warrented an entire announcement.