More productive meetings with Lync and OneNote–Part 1

When it comes to taking meeting minutes and sending out notes/action items – I’m probably about as bad as it gets. This has been a problem for me forever, and I’ve tried several ways to overcome this. Finally, I think I’ve found a solution that will make my life easier – Lync and OneNote integration!

What is it?

When you are a presenter in a Lync meeting you have the ability to create a shared OneNote allowing.  This has several benefits:

• Allows everyone to participate in note taking
• The roster in OneNote is updated as people join the meeting
• You can easily send the meeting minutes at the end of the call to all participants

The Experience

Before I show you how to set it up, let’s take a look at how it works.

Within a meeting, as presenter you can hover over the sharing button (the icon that looks like a monitor along the bottom row of the client window).  From there you change to the ONENOTE tab, and select Shared Notes.

This will popup a new window that lets you choose the page or section to share:

Once you select the page, OneNote will open and meeting attendees will get a message that you are sharing a OneNote and they can allow it to launch.

 

As you can see, participants are automatically added as they join the meeting.  As people type notes, it will automatically keep everyone in sync.  As others type, you will see their new text with their initials, letting you know who made those changes.

You can even insert the meeting details by clicking the ‘Meeting Details’ button on the ribbon. This inserts details like the invitation message, original attendee information and a link to the Outlook Item.

Finally, when finished with the call you click the ‘Email Page’ button and it will automatically populate the To: line with attendees.  Usually I made some edits and add things like Action Items or clean up the notes.

So there you have it..pretty cool!  I have gone from never taking meeting notes to a meeting minute rock star

In my next post, I’ll explain how to set this up..

----> Part 2 

[edit – added link to part 2]

Comments

• Anonymous
  April 13, 2013
  I've found that works well in a company that has a good/great Microsoft collaboration infrastructure in place--like Microsoft.  Unfortunately, while my company has Lync (for our group) and SharePoint--the latter isn't configured to allow shared notes.   Fortunately, I'm able to take my own meeting OneNotes which I frequently share later.  I create the ON note from an Outlook meeting. My wish is that Lync had a add-on for OneNote that did the Tel: hypertext link when it recognized 800-555-1212 Passcode: 123456   I cut and paste phone numbers and passcodes about five times a day because most of my company uses Verizon's conference call system.  

• Anonymous
  January 31, 2014
  When holding Lync meetings with customers who cannot join our meetings through the Lync client they are