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OneNote 2007 SP1 - Can't Create notebooks On Some Servers

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Sorry. We broke your OneNote.

In mid December Office 2007 SP1 was released on Microsoft Update. It contains lots of good improvements and a few for OneNote. However, it turns out we also broke something with one of the fixes. You can't create notebooks on a Windows file share that is also running WebDAV. This is what we call a "regression" (when in fixing something you break something else). We feel very bad about this and we're working hard to address it.

Please leave a comment below if you have hit this problem. We'd like to get a sense of how common this is and any affected configurations beyond the ones we know. Prevalence affects how urgently we can get a fix through the pipe. And please mention anything you know about your server (what the server OS is, whether it's also running SharePoint or some other web server etc.).

Here are the details and a work around.

Issue: can't create notebooks on Windows file share running WebDAV

  • If you try to create a new notebook on a Windows file share server that also runs WebDAV then you will fail to create the notebook.
  • For example if you try to create a notebook called notebookname at \\fileservername\filesharename you'll get an error message like: "OneNote cannot create a new notebook at: https://fileservername/sharename/notebookname"

Workaround:

To work around this follow these steps.

  1. Go to the folder where you want the notebook in Windows Explorer (e.g. go to \\fileservername\filesharename )
  2. Create a new folder with the name you want the notebook to have (e.g. notebookname )
  3. Right click that folder and choose "Open as Notebook in OneNote"
  4. The folder will open up as a blank notebook in OneNote. Then click on the message in the middle of the screen to create the first section and you're good to go.
  5. Alternatively: instead of step 3 above you can start OneNote then go to "File"->"Open" -> "Notebook" and then select the folder you created in step 2.

Background:

  • For the curious, the bug is related to how we check the folder path and decide under the covers which client side file redirector will handle the remote file access when working against web servers. When you're actually trying to access the plain Windows file share on the server with a UNC path, and the server is also running a WebDAV server then this logic has a flaw in it that causes it to try the WebDAV redirector (UNC paths can be valid WebDAV paths...).
  • This won't affect many people in larger companies where Windows file servers and Web servers or SharePoint servers are usually kept distinct for clear role separation.
  • It is more likely to affect small business scenarios where a server may play multiple roles and is potentially acting as a web server as well as a file share. Examples might be Windows Small Business Server depending on how it's configured.

Comments

  • Anonymous
    January 16, 2008
    I wanted to point people to another post of David's regarding a regression OneNote 2007 SP1 contained

  • Anonymous
    January 17, 2008
    The comment has been removed

  • Anonymous
    January 31, 2008
    I have experienced this issue, except I am not sure if the file server on the network where I want to put the shared notebook is running WebDAV or not.  All I know is I get the same error you mention. I am wanting to put my shared notebook on a file share. I tried the workaround it is sort of works... There is a notice at the top of my first section that says: "OneNote needs a password to sync some of your notebooks. Click here t see the list of sections and notebooks that require passwords." If I try to send a link, the link starts with http://servername/path_to_shared_notebooknotebook_folder  instead of just putting \servernamepath_to_shared_notebooknotebook_folder Is there a way to tell OneNote that, "Hey, this is just a file share, I don't need a browser URL?"

  • Anonymous
    February 12, 2008
    I ran into this today, and the workaround seems to work fine.  The server we are using is definitely running WebDAV as we have TFS and SVN there.

  • Anonymous
    February 12, 2008
    Oh, the server is also running Apache and IIS, and it's W2k3.

  • Anonymous
    February 21, 2008
    We have hit one. W2k3 SP2, also running IIS

  • Anonymous
    March 16, 2008
    Just an update on this for everyone. Thanks everyone for providing details on your configuration. We now have a fix internally for this problem that we believe addresses all these cases. We're going through test processes and release processes to get this publicly available. This process takes a while (a couple of months for non-security fixes...). Scot, thanks for the details on what happens when sending a link. That looks like a manifestation of this bug. You can manually rewrite the link address as you have done above and then it should work. That would be a work around for now, but we'll make sure that is fixed as part of this too.

  • Anonymous
    March 17, 2008
    The comment has been removed

  • Anonymous
    April 11, 2008
    The comment has been removed

  • Anonymous
    April 21, 2008
    The comment has been removed

  • Anonymous
    May 06, 2008
    I have experienced the problem, thought the work-around seems to work.

  • Anonymous
    February 07, 2010
    I recently ran into a very similar onenote problem but not quite identical. OS : Windows XP SP2 (Dutch) Office : 2007 Enterprise SP2 (Dutch) Issue : Creating a new notebook over a UNC paths work fine, but that same path mapped as a network drive does not work. Instead of taking the mapped drive Onenote again tries to put http:// in front of it, treating it as webdav. This issue does not occur before installing SP2, so I am running without it. The patch that fixed the SP1 issue (http://support.microsoft.com/kb/950130) does not work on this one (says that it is not applicable)

  • Anonymous
    June 07, 2010
    I have the same problem, but I have verified that we are NOT running WebDAV on the server.  I am running Server 2008 R2 64bit as a file server only, and we have Windows 7 64bit clients.  We have about a hundred Notebooks, one for each of our projects, and we are unable to open any of them.  We get the error "onenote needs a password to sycnch some of your notebooks, click here to see a list of notevbooks and sections".  As people have noted above, there is no way to enter a password in Onenote.   We can have all of our employees go through the full UNC path, but we have a very deep tree to our projects directory, so I know that there is going to be a lot of problems.  Is anyone else getting this problem and they don't have WebDAV running?  This is a big problem for us, if Notes is going to be broken for several months, this will need to move on to another program.  The fix above may work for new notebooks, but we need access to our existing notebooks.

  • Anonymous
    July 12, 2010
    @Tom Burke We've got the exact same issue.  If anyone has a fix for it, that would be wonderful.  I realize this post is old, but we have been hard pressed to find any info on this particular issue.

  • Anonymous
    September 20, 2010
    bdmorgan, Did you find a solution as I'm getting the exact issue you encountered described in your post.  Anyone else have a solution?

  • Anonymous
    September 20, 2010
    Here is how I resolved the issue.

  1. Create folder on SharePoint.  Example: "Meeting Notes"
  2. Open OneNote and select to Open a Workbook.  Select the Folder you create in SharePoint
  3. Create a new tab for your OneNote Workbook.  Example: "Status Meetings"
  4. Right-click on the tab and select "Save As".  Save it in the Folder you created in Step 1.
  5. Close OneNote
  6. Go go your SharePoint site folder.  Launch the Workbook file (not the files created for your tabs)
  7. Enter some test content into one of your tabs and sync.... This got my sync'ing to work and I was able to continue create the rest of my tabs without issue.