OneNote 12 Trial

Posted by Ray Cosner
Dec 19, 2006 at 05:35 PM

I’m on the staff of the VP-Engineering of a large technology-driven manufacturing company - 30,000 engineers, 150,000 total employees. I’m involved in dozens of projects at a time. Being well organized is simply a survival requirement. I use OneNote (and Ultra Recall before that) to manage information associated with current projects, information that is likely to be important in the future, and general needed background information. I mention this as context for how I use a personal information manager - currently OneNote.

I do not use OneNote for archival retention, in general. I have set up one notebook to drag/drop items for archive, but there is not a lot of stuff in it. Typically our projects build upon each other, rather than simply ending. In my usage, the value lies in capturing and having fast access to recent data, and archival data is of little value to me. The half-life of the info I save in a PIM is probably 4-6 months. I’m pretty aggressive about deleting records once a project has ended, after delaying a month or so to be sure an activity is really finished.

One thing I really like is that it’s much easier to reorganize pages, sections, and notebooks than in OneNote 2003 (drag and drop). It is very good for keeping detailed records of a project, for example, in OneNote and generating tasks in OneNote that are synchronized with Outlook 2003. It is much easier in this version (compared with OneNote 2003) to set up a hierarchy, and then change it quickly as projects evolve, split up, combine, etc. Hyperlinks also are much easier to set up - links to files, or Outlook items, or web sites including links across our internal network.

To answer your question, right now I have 12 notebooks, with combined 64 MB storage (accumulated in two months since I changed to OneNote 2007). At this level, OneNote responds as quickly as the day I installed it, and complete searches across all my notebooks run in about 3-5 seconds. Searches don’t seem as fast as InfoSelect, but with OneNote searches running in single-digit seconds the difference is not meaningful to me. I generally put links to files into OneNote, rather than the actual file.

Capabilities in OneNote 2007 that I am not using: (1) OCR of images, and search including text from images via Windows desktop search, but I am not using that capability as I don’t have a lot of image files and I use X1 for desktop search. In effect you can attach unstructured metadata to an image file by putting text notes on the same OneNote page with the file (or the link to the file). (2) Audio files can be captured via microphone and attached to a page of information, but I am not using that. (3) Also, it has a lot of features for a tablet PC, but I have a traditional notebook and so I do not use those features.

I hope this helps. I do not consider OneNote to be the ultimate tool. Personally, I loved Ecco and still consider it to be the closest to fully meeting my personal needs. However, my employer is focused on Outlook, and OneNote meshes very well with Outlook. I tried to straddle the fence with both tools for a few months, but that was futile so I reluctantly stopped using Ecco.

Ray