Using OneNote in Project Planning

In addition to its use in meetings, OneNote can also be helpful for another business use—project planning. For example, in Figure 2.10, OneNote is used to store information about an upcoming software upgrade project.

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Creating Outlook tasks with reminders from OneNote ensures that you won't forget the various action items you received in the meeting. Assigning the task to others allows even those who weren't in the meeting to receive a portion of the notes with the task.

There's a section for each component of the project: hardware, software, and training. Each section has multiple pages. The training section, for example, has a page for each department. The training notes for the Customer Service Department are shown in Figure 2.11.

None of this information does any good in a vacuum. If the project organizer creates these training schedules and doesn't share them with the various department heads, nothing will ever get done. The solution is to store these sections on a SharePoint site or network file share. Doing this allows multiple users to access the information at the same time. Only one user at a time can make changes to the OneNote page, but any number of users can access the page.

For more information about creating outlines from existing text, see “Creating Outlines from Existing Text,” Chapter 15.

If the customer service manager attempts to access his training page while the project organizer is editing it, he'll see the words “read only” displayed after the name of the page. As long as the project organizer has the page locked, the customer service manger can't make any changes. However, once the file lock is released (typically five minutes after OneNote has become idle on the project organizer's machine), the customer service manager can make his changes.

A SharePoint site is an excellent repository for OneNote pages that need to be accessed by multiple individuals. As shown in Figure 2.12, users can browse the Document Library for the project's SharePoint site and upload, download, or open a OneNote section file stored in the library.

When the project has been completed, you can remove the .one files from the SharePoint installation for archival.

SharePoint Team Services and SharePoint Portal server are products that run on a shared server to allow users to access a variety of information. SharePoint includes support for real-time collaboration along with shared tasks, contacts, and documents. For more information about sharing notes, see “Collaborating with Others,” in Chapter 23.