OneNote Sync’ing on Office Live on Skydrive

Over the last year I’ve increasingly found myself working at multiple computers. Therefore I’ve been trying to find ways of utilizing the cloud or synchronization software to allow me to access my work from anywhere without losing the flexibility usually associated with local access to the data.

For the most part this has involved utilizing live mesh to synchronize important and commonly updated folders, MS Exchange for mail/tasks/calendar, and SyncBackPro for backing up my data files. However one of the my other tasks has been to manage my OneNote access and share notebooks between machines.

Up to now I’ve simply put a folder on a server and used OneNote to synchronize locally whenever it was in contact with the server. However that server is at home for my personal OneNote notebooks and at work for my professional notebooks. Unfortunately, I have machines at both work and home that need access to both.

The other option to access my OneNote folders across machines was to synchronize them across the cloud using LiveMesh. I didn’t try it and don’t really know if there is a disadvantage to this as opposed to relying on OneNote doing the synchronization.

Now that Wave 4 of Windows Live Essentials is upon us with Live Mesh being integrated with Live Sync, Officelive.com being integrated with Office on SkyDrive, and OneNote being offered as a WebApp, I thought I’d take a look at how best to utilize these tools to sync my OneNote Folders.

Once logged into Office Live I opened the New menu and noticed the option for creating a OneNote notebook directly within my SkyDrive.

After creating a OneNote notebook, I then saw the option in the top right hand corner for opening the notebook in OneNote on the local machine.

I clicked on this option and after a dialog box warned me of opening a potentially harmful document, the notebook opened locally and my local OneNote app appeared to cache a copy. It proceeded to synchronize it with the web in the same way as some of my other notebooks synchronize with my local servers, so any changes I made locally would appear on the SkyDrive as well.

I was then free to copy over an existing set of sections and pages from a local Notebook into my sync’d SkyDrive notebook. I had a small hiccup during the sync of a particularly large set of pages, but it sync’d without error the second time. I tried just copying a local notebook to my SkyDrive and opening up the notebook in the OneNote WebApp, but it wouldn’t recognize it, so I’m assuming that the notebook has to be created by the WebApp first.

I’m not sure if this will be a more or less stable option than just synchronizing the local notebook with Livesync, but the advantage of this approach is that I can now open the same OneNote workbook directly on the web, and avoid dipping into the 2GB limit of my livesync cloud capacity.

Getting ready for next year…

My June's usually aren't this busy, but taking over as Chair, dealing with accreditation, hiring a tech, organizing 8 years worth of clutter, and trying to make sure we are all ready for next year has kept me and the rest of the dept hopping all month. Can't wait to take a break, but we still have quite a few things that have to get done by the end of June.

Our dept has spent the last few weeks standardizing on Course Outcomes and outlines across the program, establishing a common file structure for all the courses, creating a team task list and team calendar, standardizing on a course calendar structure and organizing the labs. In between all the admin stuff we’ve been juggling, this has probably been one of the most productive post-semester periods we have ever had, but also busiest.

Our program is now full and the applications are piling up. Not sure if it is all the EI running out or our program getting a name for itself; maybe it’s a combination of the two! However it means we are going to be pushing out a very healthy number of graduates for the next couple of years. The low enrollment over the past couple of years has allowed most of our graduates to meet great success with their employment, so now those numbers are doubling it’ll be interesting to see how those stats play out.

Anyway, I’m looking forward to things calming down a little for the summer so I can focus on little on some PD. Unfortunately September has an uncanny way of creeping up on you extremely quickly!