Microsoft Office OneNote Live
Taking the ball from TDavid, I’ve posted on InsideGoogle my vision of an online version of OneNote, a program I already love in its offline version. I didn’t want any MS watchers to miss this, so I’m cross-posting:
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Yes, OneNote, the most innovative document editor program I’ve ever used, lets you do real-time collaborative document sharing and editing. Right now, it requires all participants to have copies of OneNote, but…
Microsoft has a lot of powerful web-based editing tools in Office Live. Some of the components used in there are incredible and clearly took a lot of work. Why not set a small team loose to create OneNote Live? All they’d have to is take the text editing tools from Office Live and create a hosted place for sharing and creating documents online. It would link up with the OneNote desktop client, so owners of it would have their documents whereever they went and could edit offline, but could collaborate as well with anyone they needed to.
Imagine this scenario: At the beginning of a college semester, the teacher says, “Our shared workspace is located at onenote.officelive.com/fsu/cs120/spring06″. Everyone in the class would be given login credentials to this shared workspace. During class, if you have a laptop and wifi, you could write your class notes directly into a shared document, and anyone else could do the same, creating very comprehensive notes, wiki-style. In another document, the teacher would post the class assignments, and answer questions about them. In yet another section, students would post their homework (obviously, kept private from the other students).
How much easier would this make college life? You’d have a one-stop shop where students could get so much more work done, keep up on changes in the class, post their work and set up meetings with other students. And it would be a great reason to buy the OneNote client, since with it, you’d be able to use all of this offline, and integrate it into the other Microsoft Office clients.
Hey, Scoble! Give me three talented coders and I guarantee I could have this up and running by June. So why not beg the Office Live team to get on it?
Greatest live idea I’ve heard yet.
Comment by Rob M | March 10, 2006
Big no-no.
Don’t force people to use your system. I have been forced to use such horrible systems during my school years, and I refused. I don’t want it - collaboration is collaboration, not a punishment.
Besides, it’s Microsoft, and Microsoft is incapable of creating good on-line systems. You can see proof of that on pretty much any web page/web application by Microsoft. No flame intended, but I consider pretty much all of them bloated.
I do not want Web 2.0, I do not want a thin client model to be forced upon people.
It’ll only be good if it’s voluntary. But it won’t be.
Comment by Tim | March 11, 2006