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Withholding opinion

I'm a long-time Lotus Notes users, so when I tried OneNote 2007 I couldn't avoid making comparisons.

Possibly due to the phenomenon on "liking what you know" I found myself underwhelmed by the whole OneNote concept. On the one hand it has some pretty good features. On the other hand I found it to be less than the hype had led me to expect. Somewhere in the middle I had this feeling of "been there, done that."

On the good side, I do like the ability to extract text from images, even if it seems a bit spotty. In the beta 2 test drive online I thought it was a bit unfortunate that they used a business card to illustrate the feature. It would lead you to believe that such a feature would be really useful in the address book, but I didn't find it there. I'm not sure why Microsoft would have limited the feature to OneNote, when it seems to me to be pretty damned useful as a component that could (and should) have been plugged into all of Office 2007. I say it was spotty because it got a lot of the text... and also munged a good bit of it, even on perfectly clean pictures. It also interpreted some graphics as text and tried to retain some of the text attributes, which I didn't find terribly useful since it got them wrong. But it beats nothing.

Also on the good side is the ability to publish OneNote notebooks just by copying them to a shared location. This is certainly useful for informal teamwork of the sort that can be stifled by the general tendency of IT departments to need a project for everything. This is an enabler, in a good way. For Lotus to do this, you need a Domino server, and though anybody with permissions can put up a team document from a template, the fact is you still need the server. OneNote has a decided advantage for low-budget teams. I'd still have to look at security issues.

I was a bit disappointed, though, with other things. Let me see if I can articulate what bothered me about it. And keep in mind that my preferences are just that... other people evidently like this stuff.

I didn't much like the organization of the thing, or rather the lack of it. I'm a bit spoiled by Lotus Notes in this regard, I think. The OneNote team seems to take the position that it's organized because you can separate things into tabs or pages, or spaces on a page. I think it's unorganized because you have to do this to have any real hope of finding anything again.

I tend to think that this is way too much work for you when you've got two dozen projects and the piece of information you need was put in there a year ago... and not necessarily by you. OTOH, Lotus Notes takes the approach of foregoing the tired tab metaphor, allowing you to categorize your documents with keywords. You can then view the docs however you like (and the same doc might show up in multiple categories)... you can also view all the docs regardless of category. The point here is that search and retrieval are vitally important when you're dealing with old data. Google takes the same approach as Notes wrt Gmail. No tabs or folders, just keywords and search. It seems to me that OneNote is weak in this regard... in the sample data I tried searching across tabs. It did't find "Lori" in the Meetings tab, and the search results didn't seem to have any relation to what I'd asked for. From experience, what seems well organized now is a horrible mess a year from now. It's possible that I didn't grok the search facility: if so, they need to go back to the drawing board where useability of this feature is concerned. Nothing should be more intuitive than search.

By analogy, it seems to me that OneNote gives the exec a good filing system for his notes, whereas Lotus give him a good secretary. Big difference.

To my eye OneNote looks like it's trying too hard. By trying to put everything in your face at once it winds up looking busy and cluttered. Too much color means that nothing stands out among the confetti. And all the tabs and lists and chotchkas (especially those long page tabs) leave less real estate for actually taking notes than there should be. That's really an extension of my comment on search, I think... if you can retrieve things without effort then all that clutter is unnecessary.

The middle ground is the "been there, done that" sort of stuff. OneNote seems to be ok for what it is. I didn't find the Outlook integration to be any better than Lotus' ability to doclink to a To-Do or send a page (or a link to a page) as email. These seemed to be comparable with Notes functionality (though I was surprised to find that, when I started to email a page, then changed my mind and quit the application a second copy of the email was hidden behind the application window. Outlook subsequently died. We expect a few such things with a beta.

When taken with the rest of the Office suite, OneNote seems a bit "bolted on" if you know what I mean, though I'm sure that someone used to it would think the same of Lotus Notes. One collaboration feature of Notes that I use A LOT is treating a team database as a mail-in database. For instance, the same database can be a Wiki and document repository, and can receive emails intended for the entire team. I then cc all mail correspondence to the database without losing any metadata. This gives you a great way of packaging ALL development documentation for a project in one database file for archiving. I didn't see whether that was possible here. You can drag emails into it, but that's like having a bike when you need a car. OneNote allowed dragging the emails into a page as attachments, but wouldn't convert them to printouts. I also like Notes' ability to serve up database pages to a browser. I didn't see whether OneNote was similarly Internet ready. I really didn't expect workflow, so I didn't look for it.

As I said, I'm pretty lukewarm about it. It has a couple of nifty features I wouldn't mind having, but I wouldn't jump ship to get them. It also lacks some things I use a lot. Others opinions may differ.

Posted by: dave.leigh@...   Posted on: 07/06/06 You are currently: a Guest | Members login | Terms of Use

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