One of the reasons for purchasing a Toshiba Tecra M4 Tablet PC was to use Microsoft OneNote for free-form planning, mindmapping, and note taking (such as in meetings with clients, where the page is projected onto the wall), along with the retention of those pages in a notebook-style interface. A particular feature of interest in OneNote was “Shared Sessions” (or would should perhaps more accurately be called, "Live Sessions", in keeping with Microsoft's other real-time offerings), a Pillar 3-type capability that permits multiple people with OneNote to jointly view and edit one or more OneNote pages. One license to OneNote SP1 came with the M4, and I downloaded the 60-day free trial of OneNote SP1 for my other Toshiba laptop, thus enabling me to try out Shared Sessions in my lab. During my recent visit to the US, Eric Mack and I held a number of OneNote Shared Sessions, including a demonstration one during the 7 Pillars tutorial I ran at CTC2005. Based on those experiences, I offer the following observations about what works and what doesn’t with OneNote Shared Sessions.
Positive Aspects
Shared Sessions work! It is possible to share and jointly write and edit a single OneNote page or a collection of pages:
- Multiple People can contribute Simultaneously. Multiple parties in the session can write and contribute simultaneously … either by ink or text. There is no forced round-robin of contributions, that is, where people have to request control and then have sole edit rights for a duration of time. People can work together at a certain place on a OneNote page, or can work independently within the shared page or collection thereof.
- Participants as Read-Only or Contributors. The originator of the session can indicate via a tick box whether those joining the session are permitted to edit the page or collection of pages, or whether they are invited for a read-only session.
- Multiple Pages can be Shared. Either a single page or a collection of pages can be shared in a Shared Session. The originator of the session can add other pages into the shared session at any time. If recipients are ticked as contributors in the shared session, they too can add pages.
- Text Can be Dragged in from Other Applications. A paragraph from a Microsoft Word document, for example, can be dragged straight out of Word and dropped into the OneNote Shared Session. This provides a simple (and free!) way of collaborating on a block of text. Once the parties are satisfied with the resultant revision, it can be dragged back into Microsoft Word.
Some of the scenarios where this is useful include:
- Small collocated teams. Teams of 3-5 people that are in the same building but not necessarily on the same floor can hold shared screen meetings from their respective desks. Each can be included in the audio conference while also sharing a visual reference point across the network.
- Single-truth notetaking during a meeting. People coming together for a meeting in a conference room can share a OneNote session. All notes from the session are recorded on the same page, with agreements flagged and next actions noted. When each person leaves, they have the complete history of the meeting with them.
- Walk-around whiteboarding during a meeting. A computer running OneNote is connected to a data projector. The presenter or facilitator has a Tablet running OneNote, and is connected into a Shared Session via a wireless link. They have the freedom to roam throughout the room with the Tablet, and any notes that they take on the Tablet are immediately displayed on the projected screen.
- One-to-one brainstorming. Someone stuck for just the right phrase for an email to an irate customer can initiate a Shared Session with a colleague to brainstorm for the perfect string of words. Emails don’t have to be traded, and they can share the same real-time visual canvas.
Limitations
There are eight main limitations that I’ve noted with the current iteration of OneNote Shared Sessions.
- Duplicated Pages when Re-Connecting. When a Shared Session is started, the shared page from the originator’s computer is pushed to the joining parties. If one of the joining parties leaves the session (they have to take another call, or the network connection drops), they are sent a second and duplicate copy of the page when they re-connect. Hence, a OneNote Shared Session is fine for quick transactional meetings, but not for ongoing and multi-time interactions around a single page.
- No Tagging of Contributions by Author. The contributions of ink and text made by participants are not flagged with their name. Therefore when the participants review the page at a later time, the metadata about who said what at what point in the shared session is not available. One way around this is for each person in the session to use a different colored pen or font, but that (a) requires an intentional agreement by the different parties, and (b) the range of colors that could be used and that are sufficiently visually different is practically limited. Perhaps it is not a big deal in practice … but I’d like to see OneNote automatically capture and record the metadata.
- No Ability to Withdraw Pages after the Shared Session. The originator of the Shared Session has no way of withdrawing the shared page after the session. I can see that there are many times when the originator would be fine with allowing the participants to retain a copy of the page, but there is a need, too, for them to be able to specify that they don’t want a copy of the page to remain in the wild after the session.
- No Find Me / Follow Me. Given that each person is fully autonomous within the shared collection of pages, in other words that each can decide where they are working and can work independently of everyone else, there should be a “find user / follow user” function. I see this working like this. There is already a list of participants displayed when the Task Pane is open; as a user in the session, I should be able to right click on someone’s name and choose “find user” or “follow user”. If the former, my OneNote screen would move to wherever that person was currently working. If the latter, my OneNote screen would move to where that person was working, and would then keep changing as the other person moved around. This would stop a lot of the unnecessary coordinative words during a shared session, such as, “I’m now shifting down the page to the next paragraph”, or “I’m writing at the base of the first page we shared”.
- No Instant Messaging Integration. There is no integration with Windows or MSN Messenger, which is surprising. Firstly, it should be possible to see who of your current buddies are online from a pane integrated down the right or left hand side of the interface. Secondly, as a second way of inviting people to a shared session, it should be possible to initiate a shared session by dragging a page title and dropping it onto a group name or individual’s name, just like with IBM’s Activity Explorer. This would have the effect of sending each individual an invite to the session, which when accepted would result in the page being sent across. Finally, as quick way of joining a Shared Session, users could right click on the name of the host of Shared Session to see the name of the Shared Session and click to join.
- Works Best on the Same Subnet. Shared Sessions work out-of-the-box on a network subnet, due to the use of Port 2302, which is generally blocked at the firewall. To share across the Internet, users need an Internet-level IP address, and a port on the firewall through which they can work. Eric and I successfully did this between New Zealand and the US, but for most users it wouldn’t work without serious IT involvement. It would be nice to have an easier and more invisible way of doing this, something like the instant messaging experience, as I outlined above.
- Can’t Set Individual Editing Rights. In a shared session with 10 people, the originator may only want to delegate contributor edit rights to one other person. They can’t do it in OneNote; the read-only vs. contribute option is for all participants.
- To-Do Note Flags are Shared not Personal. A To-Do Note Flag enables a user to set a tickable-reminder of something to do. If these are set on a page during a Shared Session, or exist on a page prior to a Shared Session, then everyone who connects with that page inherits the To-Do note. There is no ability to associate a specific person with a To-Do Note Flag. This current approach doesn’t work in a collaborative setting.
There is sufficiently good value to be had from Shared Sessions that I hope Microsoft will resolve these limitations in a future version, and yes, I understand that some of them are non-trivial.
Proposed Next Actions for Organizations
If you can live with the limitations of OneNote Shared Sessions, this is worth a look. The software is relatively inexpensive ($99 retail per user license), and the collaborative capabilities require no punitive per minute charges for collaborating during a meeting or on a document.
What About You?
The OneNote team at Microsoft uses Shared Sessions for its regular team meetings. Do you use OneNote and Shared Sessions at your place? I’d love to hear your experiences—good or bad—and in particular whether the limitations above prevent you from making use of the capability. Please leave a comment below, or send me an email at
michael.sampson@shared-spaces.com.
