If you're willing to install the preview service pack for OneNote, you can do this now. I've been running the preview SP1 for a week or so now with no problems, so I'll be pusihing this higher on the priority list.

Say what you will about Winer, but from this user's perspective he shows deep wisdom on the long term competitive value of supporting a small number of formats that are simple and that work. It's so easy to fall into the lazy trap of trying to build your strategy on creating proprietary formats and trying to "lock in" your customers. If you want to understand why that's a dumb idea, track down and watch the recent Michael Porter interview on Charlie Rose. Then think about what Porter is saying.

Wow, this is cool. The next release of Microsoft's OneNote will import OPML outlines. Very good. Of course it should export them too. The old Microsoft would never have done this, in fact there's an old Microsoft guy running around the syndication community, he's one of the biggest advocates of reinventing everything just for the sake of revinvention. It takes a lot for a big company like Microsoft to adopt a format developed outside, esp one not developed at another BigCo. Thanks for setting a great example. Google, please pay attention to this. You lose nothing by keeping the number of formats small, by building on other people's work instead of undermining it, by not being evil. You already knew that, at the top, but perhaps some of the new guys don't understand what it means. It's in the company prospectus. So I hope you won't mind if we hold you to a higher standard. I assume that's why it's there. [Scripting News]

11:17:39 PM •  • comment  

More good stuff on connecting OneNote and other outlining tools and concepts.

Filling the outliner gap on Windows.

I was recently reminded of the gap on the Windows platform in really good outlining tools. I am a long-time OmniOutliner user on my Mac, and haven’t really found a good, cheap, lightweight tool for managing structured outlines on Windows. According to this thread on Outliners.com, the leading candidates are probably Inspiration and NoteMap. NoteMap knows about hoisting, and Inspiration allows for some unstructured brainstorming in addition to pure outlining. But it’s not apparent that either has one of the elegant simple features I would need: the ability to convert an outline into a structured to-do list (which is desperately needed for our house projects).

Enter OneNote. I’ve had this app installed since I got Office 2003 but hadn’t really played with it until the last few days. It uses a notebook metaphor, automatically saves notes, allows for placement of multiple text and graphics blocks on the page, and has some really good outline features, including quick and intuitive numbering mechanisms and the ability to set to-do checkboxes. No hoisting and no ability to create columns on outline items, but otherwise pretty nice.

Miscellaneous links: Andrew May has a draft MSDN article about new import features in OneNote 1.1; Josh Allen wrote an OPML importer that works with the preview of OneNote 1.1; Omar Shahine writes an RSS to OneNote PowerToy that basically allows you to easily copy items from RSS feeds to an outline for later reading.

[Jarrett House North]

11:10:05 PM •  • comment  

This is going to get interesting quickly. Not sure how quickly I can make time to play with this in the next week, but I will get to it.

OneNote imports OPML.

Very cool, the next version of OneNote will support importing OPML outlines.

[Scobleizer: Microsoft Geek Blogger]

11:08:27 PM •  • comment  

Marjolein continues to do great work with her new ActiveWords blog, AWesome.  She's started a webring for those of us who are fans of that productivity tool.

Two-fold Boost. The WebRing and my self-esteem got a boost today. Three experienced ActiveWords users were added to the WebRing. Please take the time to join too. Soliciting and organizing all this does take quite a bit of my time (my cute... [AWesome]

10:58:25 PM •  • comment