"In my line of work, efficiency is the name of the game: The less energy I spend organizing raw data, the more I can focus on putting it to work. OneNote is the organization and collaboration solution I've been dreaming of for years."

Scott Bright is a principal of Synapse Product Development, LLC, a Seattle-based product-development consulting group. Like others in his small firm, Scott wears many hats, including program manager, account manager, IS Manager, and design engineer.

Before Microsoft Office OneNote 2003, Scott and his colleagues relied on Microsoft Outlook® to schedule their time, communicate with one another, and keep track of tasks — and they took notes on paper. Typing those notes into documents or e-mail messages and copying action items into Outlook required time they didn't have.

Critical details and plans concerning projects from client meetings were also captured on paper. As time permitted, notes were typed and stored either in binders or in folders on employee computers. Transcribing and organizing those notes was a time-consuming task — and no one in the firm had a surplus of time. But if no one performed this administrative task, there was no guarantee that critical information was recorded and saved in a format that could be easily shared.

Scott believed his company needed a more efficient way to organize and track client development projects and to share ideas across teams. They needed a software program that provided a flexible work environment, while offering the organizational and collaborative aspects of programs like Microsoft Office Outlook® 2003 and Microsoft Office Word 2003 — without inhibiting creativity.

Then Scott discovered OneNote. Since the day he first used the program, his note-taking habits have become more organized and efficient. OneNote quickly became a convenient hub for all his project-planning activities. Now, Scott relies on OneNote as a storehouse for the essential information he uses to organize projects and people and to run a small business — and some of his colleagues have started to use OneNote, too.

Note  Some of the features or functionality described in this topic are available only if you have installed Microsoft Office OneNote 2003 Service Pack 1. To learn more about the service pack and how to download it, see Service pack features in OneNote 2003.

Using OneNote to organize projects, and run a business

As an engineer and consultant, Scott's business priority is to develop creative solutions for his clients. To accomplish this, he must communicate details and action items from meetings to the appropriate people within his company in an organized and timely manner. To this end, Scott now uses OneNote to take notes while planning projects and solving business-development and operational issues when he meets with clients, development teams, or Synapse management. With all of his information at his fingertips, he can easily communicate action items to team members and share notes through e-mail. Let's take a look at how Scott organizes his notebook, captures information, and shares that information with others.

Organization: from knowledge base to shopping list

Scott's notebook consists of topic-specific folders and sections in which he keeps notes from each project meeting with clients, team members, or both. This gives him an automatic historical record for all business interactions. Issues that arise at any time are easily referenced through OneNote's search function. With page tabs on the vertical edge and folder and section tabs across the top, projects, clients, meetings, and specific issues are easy to navigate.

The sections and folders in Scott's notebook run the gamut from general knowledge base to household management — including an area for grocery shopping lists! As an engineer, Scott relies heavily on all kinds of technical and design information that he has collected over the course of his professional life. Accordingly, Scott has created a folder called "Knowledge Base.” He uses this folder to store information that may not belong to a particular project, but may come in handy during the course of development of many different projects. The illustration below shows how Scott's Knowledge Base folder is organized.

Unlike a paper notebook or file system, Scott's Knowledge Base folder is easily searchable. All he has to do is remember one word of the concept he is looking for and search for it with OneNote's keyword search. Immediately, any pages containing that word are displayed.

Other folders and sections in Scott's OneNote notebook include:

• Meeting Notes:  This folder is broken down into sections for different types of internal meetings, including business development and strategy.
• Project Management:  This folder contains a section for each of his clients. Notes he takes in meetings with these clients or with his development teams are stored in these sections.
• Personal Projects:  This folder includes sections for house projects and shopping lists.
• Side Notes:  This is the default OneNote section for side notes, which Scott uses to store notes he takes while doing research on the Web, or in other situations where he wants to quickly record information but postpone organizing it in his notebook until later.
• Pocket PC Notes:  Notes taken on Scott's Windows Mobile–based Pocket PC and audio notes recorded on a Smartphone are copied to this section. When taking notes on his Tablet PC isn't convenient or appropriate, Scott can take quick notes on his Pocket PC or make audio recordings on a Smartphone. The next time he connects these devices to his computer, notes and audio recordings are automatically transferred to OneNote.

Capturing notes in a variety of formats

OneNote provides the flexibility Scott and other engineers need when they brainstorm. In OneNote, they can capture thoughts in the form of freeform sketches, block diagrams, handwritten notes, and mind-mapping diagram techniques. The illustration below shows a block diagram from Scott's notebook.

Sketches or notes taken in spiral notebooks, on scraps of paper, whiteboards, or even sticky notes, are more difficult to centralize and make available to others, and they are often easily lost. OneNote's drawing and handwriting capabilities enable engineers who use pen input devices or Tablet PCs to take notes the way they think and also to store those notes in a central location. That makes it much easier to share and search miscellaneous brainstorming and project-planning notes.

Including audio and video recordings can greatly enhance the content of an engineer's notebook. Video recordings of product demonstrations, test cases, or usage scenarios recorded in OneNote can be extremely useful for later reference. In addition, audio recordings used to supplement handwritten or typed notes from meetings or demonstrations can make sharing information with others an even richer experience.

Sharing information with OneNote and Outlook

Because of the close integration between OneNote and Microsoft Office Outlook® 2003, Scott relies on both programs as his primary work tools. He uses OneNote as his daily journal, where he keeps all notes related to engineering — including concept sketches, quick schematics, mechanical operations, and flow charts of software processes — as well as notes related to administrative issues, such as project-planning details and resource assignments.

Scott uses note flags to mark items that he or other team members need to give attention to or follow up on later. A note flag summary quickly pulls up a list of things to do, both for himself and for his colleagues. From OneNote, Scott can create Outlook tasks, based on these items, and send them to the appropriate individuals or save them for himself. In the following illustration, you can see Scott's tasks as they appear when flagged in OneNote, and after they are transferred into his Outlook Tasks folder.

Encouraging company-wide collaboration

Scott has seen how OneNote can improve information sharing within his company. Before, he lived with the awareness that important and innovative information that existed on paper might never surface to aid in development projects. But now, Scott's teams have begun to use OneNote as their daily journals, logs, sketch books, and repositories for ideas. They swap information in the form of OneNote files through e-mail or at shared network locations.

Some have also begun conducting shared note-taking sessions, where they can draw or type on shared notebook pages simultaneously, in real time — no matter where they are. Collaboration over engineering design concepts is often a visual experience, and unless the whole team can see, contribute to, and comment on ideas, it's hard to make progress toward project milestones. Shared note-taking sessions eliminate the barriers to communication, which can occur when teams can't meet in person. Whether down the hall in another meeting room or on the road, individuals can continue to collaborate and keep the company's projects moving forward.

Even though Scott wears as many hats as ever, he's become more efficient through his own use of OneNote, and the flow of information has increased throughout his organization because essential information is now much more easily communicated. OneNote allows engineers the freedom to brainstorm — while alleviating the burden of tracking, transcribing, and organizing tasks that they had to perform when taking notes on paper. Inter- and intrateam communications have become more effective through the sharing of OneNote pages, and collaboration has become easier than ever. Because of OneNote, Scott and some of his colleagues are now able to devote more of their time to developing innovative solutions for clients, and he rests easier knowing that the information that can put his company a step ahead is now more likely to be used.