By Frank Koch

As an Account Technology Specialist for Microsoft Corporation in Switzerland, it's my job to advise companies on how best to implement Microsoft solutions to help solve problems within their businesses. I do my best to understand the big picture of our customers' business processes so I can truly understand their technology needs from the ground up.

Recently, I had the opportunity to present a proposal to a large international firm that needed a better way to manage their IT infrastructure. I spent two days at the company discussing an implementation of Microsoft Systems Management Server 2003. SMS 2003 would provide a scalable architecture to support all the customer's clients worldwide — a tool for deploying Microsoft updates, a built-in inventory and Web reporting tool, and remote control functionality for the folks at the company's Help Desk.

Identifying my objectives

The plan was to spend two days collaborating at the highest level — simultaneously sharing ideas about how to solve business pain points, making lists of important criteria, brainstorming on how to achieve important goals, and architecting network configurations. In order to understand the customer's needs and to successfully articulate the SMS 2003 solution to my client, my presentation had to accomplish three things:

• Make all of the information accessible.
• Allow for easy discussion and collaboration.
• Allow for the information discussed and the materials produced to be shared quickly in the form of meeting notes after the meeting.

On the last point, I had a personal motive as well: The company I was visiting is based in Geneva, which is a two-hour train ride from my home. I wanted to be able to come home at the end of a long commute and spend the evening with my wife instead writing status e-mails from scratch. I needed the best communication and collaboration tools at my disposal. Enter OneNote.

I was already using OneNote for taking notes during meetings, reviewing those notes at my desk, and completing them with relevant information that I found on the Internet or intranet. I also used Microsoft Office Outlook 2003 together with OneNote to copy meeting details into my notebook and create Outlook tasks from meeting action items. Finally, I was able to transfer notes and audio recordings from my Windows Mobile-based Pocket PC and Smartphone to OneNote, so I could keep track of my tasks anytime, anywhere — even on the train while commuting to client sites. However, I had never run a meeting with OneNote before. Here was my chance. My plan was to use OneNote on my Tablet PC, connected to an overhead projector.

Preparing for my meeting with OneNote

It took me little time to prepare for the meeting. Here's what I did:

1. I created a new section and titled it with the customer's name.
2. I went to the customer's Web site, took a screen clipping of the "About Us" information, and pasted it on the first page in the section for an overview of the company.
3. I inserted the details of the meeting from Outlook, also on that first page in my section.
4. The customer had sent me a diagram of the network in a Microsoft Word document, so I inserted that document as a picture on a new page in the section.

The following illustration shows the section of my notebook where I prepared for the meeting. The customer's name has been changed for confidentiality.

These are the same four steps that I now use to prepare for all my meetings. These steps give me all of the information that I need to have in one spot in OneNote, so I can easily refer to it during a meeting. The information is right at my fingertips, but it's also easy to add to, move, change, and rearrange.

Sharing network design ideas with OneNote

In the meeting room, after all the introductions were made, I connected my Tablet PC to the projector and started OneNote. At first, I was greeted with the common skepticism of people being introduced to new software. However, as the meeting progressed and we filled page after page with notes about the company's network environment and the goals of the project, I realized that OneNote was quickly understood and accepted.

As we discussed network concepts, I drew ideas in OneNote. OneNote quickly became the hit of the meeting as I passed the Tablet PC around to others who wanted to add ideas to the diagrams. Had they also been running OneNote, we could have accomplished the same thing in a shared note-taking session without passing the hardware around the room. As it was, it still made for a fun and collaborative environment, and almost everyone in the room got to experience OneNote hands-on.

As ideas for creating a systems management proposal are discussed, the criteria continually change. This results in many revisions of network schemes. Traditionally, this is done on paper, which means either you start over with a blank page each time you need to move server objects or bandwidth connections, or you cross things out and rewrite them many times over, resulting in a barely legible mess! And, as you create a complex web of system components and connections, it's not uncommon to run out of space on the paper, flip to a new sheet, and later have to make diagrams that span multiple pages match up.

With OneNote, I experienced this design process quite differently. First, I drew the company's current network design on a page in OneNote. As a reference, I used the image that I had inserted on a page before the meeting. Because art is not my forte and I wanted everyone to be able to recognize the images of network components, I dragged Microsoft Office Visio 2003 shapes onto the OneNote page to represent servers, firewalls, and so on.

After I created a map of the current network, I made a copy of it and pasted it onto a new page in OneNote. Then we made changes to the configuration as we saw fit. To move server objects, we simply dragged them with the stylus. To increase or decrease bandwidth connections, we also used the stylus to adjust the lines connecting the server objects. And when we needed more space, we simply added space on the OneNote page without having to transfer our ideas to a new page and make the connections match up.

Each time we wanted to start over with a new design, I made another copy of the original design, pasted it onto a new page, and proceeded to alter the design. In total, we filled about 30 notebook pages with potential design implementations, criteria lists, and descriptions of the impact of the solution for the customer's current IT environment. The beauty of this process was that we could quickly refer to any of the various designs by moving the mouse over the page tabs in my notebook. The design would be projected onto the overhead screen. The following illustration shows just one example of the many designs we created.

Disseminating information after the meeting

Sharing notes from the meeting was almost as simple as the meeting preparation. During my evening train ride home at the end of each day, I reviewed our designs and made comments on pages where I wanted to highlight important criteria that would guide us toward our final proposal. At home, I sent the OneNote (.one) file directly to my colleagues at Microsoft for their review, as they would later work with the customer on the implementation. After I gathered their feedback, I sent the updated notes to the team members who had been present at the meeting. Even though they weren't yet using OneNote, I was able to share the meeting notes with them by publishing them in HTML format. That way, they could read the notes as an e-mail or as a Web page.

Conclusion

At the end of two days, with the help of OneNote, I felt like I had accomplished far more than I set out to. I had helped our client create a viable scheme for revitalizing their network through the help of a Systems Management Server 2003 implementation, and I had inadvertently introduced them to a new product (OneNote!) that they are now considering adopting as a meeting room collaboration and productivity tool to replace an outmoded paper and pen system. Once again, I had also improved my own productivity and collaboration skills tenfold with OneNote. But most importantly, I recognized from this experience that the power of OneNote reaches far beyond its merits as a personal productivity tool: I saw how OneNote, used in a collaborative enterprise setting, could bring people and teams together to achieve common goals.

Frank Koch is a Microsoft Account Technology Specialist currently working with the Swiss Federal Government in the area of Operations and Systems Management.