Reality Sets In & the Fusion of Outlook & OneNote???

The Reality of Being ONE with OneNote
At this point, it might seem that I dislike OneNote more than I love it. The reality is that OneNote is useful, but you have to be realistic about its potential.

• OneNote is a digital note-taking application.
• OneNote is a version 1.0 product, and guess what? It has a lot of version 1.0 issues.
• OneNote's utilization of the TabletPC is poor. Hand writing notes into OneNote is clumsy to say the least.
• OneNote has promise, but don't try to push it beyond its intended use and abilities or it will disappoint you every time.

Suggestions for the Future
The real problem OneNote faces is that it is pioneering new technology. With innovation, there are always growing pains. For OneNote, there is little definition in the market for how a program like this should function and look. I don't envy the tasks of the design engineers at Microsoft. They are likely to get certain things just right and fail miserably on other things.

My advice to Microsoft is to go back to the drawing board and don't be afraid to take Version 2 to the next level. Even if this means throwing away some of the version 1 approaches, do it! Improve the navigation. Improve the use of drag and drop in the application. Improve the Tablet PC integration (make this feel just as smooth flowing as using a legal pad: I think Tablet Journal has this feel). Give us the ability to embed data from other apps. Give us a programming access model, or at least at a minimum way to get to the native file store through XML.

Let me pose this thought as well. I have asked myself "What do users really want?" My conclusion is that a blend of Outlook and OneNote is the gold medal winner! Remember the Outlook "Note" feature. Even though this feature is beyond basic, it is used by a lot of people to capture notes of various kinds. There is something we can learn here. People want one application that captures their schedule, contacts for the people they work with, the information they collect related to their schedule, tasks, and contacts. Either make these programs work seamlessly together or make them one application.

I noticed yesterday that my buddy (a former Minnesota native, yah, sure, you bet) John Durant commented on this same idea on his blog yesterday. I'm not alone in this idea!

If you are using OneNote, tomorrow I'll share an invaluable resource that will make the OneNote Version One dot Zero turbulence a little more bearable.