So I'm a pretty big fan of organization programs. I currently use
Natara Bonsai, which is a pretty sophisticated outlining program. It syncs up nicely with my Treo 650 and the mobile client has the full functionality of the windows client. I use it for organizing projects at work and at home. It fits well with the
Getting Things Done system that I've been using for the past year (Thanks again
Kenny!). More on Bonsai and GTD later.
Before I used Bonsai I was a huge
Microsoft OneNote fan (this was back in the Office 2003 days). It was the first org app that really caught my attention and I quickly fell in love with it's ease of use. I like it's freeform nature. You could click on an area within and start typing. It allowed for organized lists, tables, imported images. It integrated nicely with the other Office apps. You could create emails/tasks/appointmens from any of your OneNote outlines. The tasks would remain synced with Outlook. You could also import any Outlook Notes directly into OneNote. I used this particular feature to take notes on my old
Samsung i700, then import them into OneNote for further processing.
While this system worked, if you wanted to be completely mobile it had one serious shortcoming. There wasn't a mobile client. It was a one way street. Take the notes on the mobile, import and organize in OneNote, and they were stuck there. No syncing back up with the mobile. I know you could use the tasks feature of Outlook for this (OneNote Task -> Outlook Task -> Mobile Task), but I was really stretching the boundaries with all the projects and tasks I was trying to keep organized all at once. This was the main reason I switched back to Palm and Bonsai.
Fastforward to the present. My boss has been raving about
OneNote that comes with Office 2007. I just did a little googling and found that not only did Microsoft release a mobile client for OneNote 2003, but they have full mobile integration with OneNote 2007. Some other new features include OCR for any images you take and include with an outline (say with your mobile's camera), internal linking between outlines, and multi-user editing capabilities. It sounds like they've taken some good ideas from wikis.
Needless to say, I'm very interested. The only problem is that I don't have an up to date windows mobile platform (pocketpc or smartphone). This is probably a good thing since I really like my Natara Bonsai (and don't have the $$$ to get a new phone). It's just that I sometimes get stuck in Bonsai's rigid hierarchical nature (more on that soon).
If anyone out there is using OneNote 2007 (with or without it's mobile capabilities) I'd be very interested to hear from you.
Extra: It also looks like they've provided an API for OneNote 2007. This wasn't the case with OneNote 2003 (or maybe I didn't look hard enough).
Edit: The
wikipedia article is pretty informative.
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