OneNote Shared Sessions

It's been awhile since I have had time to update my blog, but it looks like I may be able to spend a little time on it for the next little while. I thought I'd try to do a series of posts on good or clever or original ways to use OneNote. Please feel free to share your stories with me - I LOVE hearing about how people use the product, and I will share the best ones with the team.

In my opinion, one of the cooler features of OneNote 2003 is "Shared Sessions" (this requires you to have Sp1 installed, as I know most of you have done already.)

A shared session is a peer-to-peer shared note-taking experience. "peer-to-peer" means you don't need some fancy server or web site. You just have to have a network where your machine can connect to other machines running OneNote.

You can set up a shared session with as many other people as you want - we have tried over 70 in our testing, but most people do it with 10 or less. It works best on an intranet, but you can also run a shared session over the internet or through firewalls, provided your firewall allows such connections.

The experience is kind of freaky at first - anyone can type or write or paste stuff onto the page(s) being shared, without waiting for other people to save or "pass the baton" or whatever. You just do what you want, and so does everyone else. It is a little like IM, except that instead of a conversation where everything goes one after the other with two or more discussions being jumbled together and the comments disappearing off the top of the screen, you can use the whole page and people can work on their own stuff. It is a little like a giant whiteboard that everyone can stand at and write stuff on, since just like a whiteboard, you spend more time reading what other people write than writing yourself. Plus rather than just handwriting or diagrams, you can type, paste in pictures, charts, graphs, etc. You can also add additional pages at any time, for supporting material, etc.

At first you may think this is just a trick that isn’t really useful, but you have to explore it to see the possibilities. For example, on the OneNote team every week we have a status meeting where development, testing, program management, marketing, user assistance (help, documentation), localization, support, planning, etc. come together to update each other on what is going on. In the "old" days, we'd all sit at a table and go around the room, with each representative saying their bit for 5min or so. The meeting usually took the full scheduled hour, and we often didn't have time for the important discussion after the status where we wanted to talk about what we were going to do. Some people never got to give their status since we got stuck on one topic.

In the "new" world with shared sessions, things are very different. First, one of us sends out a shared session invitation via email. This is easy enough - you just use File/Share with others, then choose to "Start a session…", which offers to share the current page. Click "Start Shared Session", then Invite Participants..., and send that invitation. Within a minute or so, people have joined.

Now, it is good to start with a template of some kind to provide structure. In our case, we have the team logo at the top, then we have sections like this:

Agenda

Dev Status

Test Status

PM Status

Etc.

The meeting organizer can fill in some meeting agenda items that he wants to make sure we discuss. So can others - at any time. This is great to start the meeting with, since everyone can see that there is this set of topics that we need to cover. That helps with pacing the meeting - how many meetings have you been to that ended with the time running out and people saying "But I wanted to talk about X…"?

At the same time, anyone can start to fill in the relevant section for their team. So right before your eyes, all 8 or 10 sections start filling themselves out, like some kind of magic book from Harry Potter. In 3 minutes or so, the entire team status has been entered, and you can read it all there, without waiting for people to verbally repeat all of it. This is so much faster than the old way that even with questions and people clarifying what they have written, the status part of the meeting is usually over in 20min instead of the 60+ min of the old way. In our meeting, the test team brings a whole set of charts such as our bug trends over time, support issues, stability trend, etc. They add a second page for these, and dump them all in there, ready made (copy/Paste from Excel). Each person can read those at their leisure, zoom in, etc. Way better than handouts (Color! Zoom!), and you have a permanent record.

If we adjourned there, we'd have saved time and it would be worth it. But what we find is that we can now use the rest of our shared time to talk strategy, or project management plan, or whatever other burning question that actually needs to be resolved. This makes the whole meeting much more valuable than in the past, since rather than just reporting information we are actually making decisions.

But it gets better. Sometimes one of us is late to the meeting, since they are stuck in some other activity. They arrive, having missed the first 20min. They open the email invitation to the shared session, and in seconds they have all the notes written so far. A quick scan and they are up to speed - now they didn't miss much at all, especially of the status reporting part. Even cooler, a few times I have not been able to make the meeting since I was stuck in some other meeting or conference call where my full attention was not required, so I opened the invitation in that meeting and was able to see what was going on. I was even able to ask questions by typing them on the shared page, even though I wasn't in the room, and was in fact attending a different meeting. "Freaky deaky!", you’re saying.

Now, this bit about not having to be in the room but still being able to see the shared notes, diagrams, charts, etc is key. We sometimes have people attending remotely, from California or Japan. In the old way, these people had to listen to speakerphone. If you've ever done this, you know that it is very hard to listen to a meeting this way, since the people physically in the room forget about you, speak quietly, draw on the whiteboard, etc and you can't follow. Now, with a shared session, you see everything they are drawing, and you also see the summary notes that someone (or multiple people) are capturing in real-time so it is much easier to follow. You can also draw a diagram yourself if necessary or just highlight part of a chart so you are not stuck having to explain your concept in words over the phone.

Ever had the experience of attending a meeting and then finding out later that all the things you discussed and decided were remembered differently by the other people in the room? Another great effect of shared notes is that you have a live record of the meeting that you can verify is accurate and even edit yourself before the meeting ends. That way things are very clear about what was decided, and you don't have to get some "minutes-taker" to understand a clarification you want to make to the notes - just edit it yourself. At the end of the meeting it is easy for everyone to review the written record of decisions made, so there is no confusion.

Wait, it gets even slicker. Sometimes you are in a meeting where you have "sides" (as in Group A is negotiating with Group B). During the meeting, it is really hard for the members of each group to stay in sync regarding their position, since they can't read each others' minds to determine how the others are reacting to new information unveiled at the meeting. But with shared notes you can set up a session just for your "side" of the meeting, and each of you can contribute. If any of you are taking notes, rather than have all five of your team take the same notes just take shared notes so more of you can listen at a time. You are going to have more complete notes with more time to participate yourself. You can also type things like "be sure to ask about X", or "let's be careful not to mention Y" or "what do we think of their plan?" (and get responses). That way you can manage your side's strategy much more effectively. If you are a consultancy, sometimes your client can ask you point blank for your opinions immediately after presenting their situation, and if you disagree with each other in your answers you're going to look silly. Well, just write down your thoughts in the shared notes as the client is presenting their situation to you, and you can be sure to know what all the members of your consultant team are thinking before any of you have to open your mouths.

So those are a few examples of using shared sessions. How are you all using it?

Comments

• Anonymous
  February 22, 2005
  
  I just want a shared session with myself. I want my onenote database to live in the cached outlook database so that no matter where i am, my notes are there.
  
  Otherwise, i'm lugging my laptop around when i don't need it. The shared session scenario is way less useful than that.

• Anonymous
  February 22, 2005
  That's certainly interesting. Now if we just had a ultra slim and light 14" tablet pc for $500 .. To accommodate your powerhorse notebook. Perhaps in two years?

• Anonymous
  February 22, 2005
  Adam,
  
  That's a different feature from shared sessions. When you say you don't want to lug your laptop around, how are you using the Outlook cached offline folder?
  Did you know you can use Windows offline folders with OneNote? If your notes are on a desktop, share out the folder that has your notes, then connect to that from your laptop, and set that folder to be available offline. Then point your laptop copy of Onenote to use that folder as the notebook. Presto - you have offline access to your notes, and these sync back to your desktop.

• Anonymous
  February 22, 2005
  I have a couple of queries:
  
  - How does the meeting work? Is there a leader? A facilitator?
  
  - If many participants are in their cubicles, how do they get answers to any questions they put on the notes? Maybe the person questioned doesn't want to answer!
  
  - Do you actually schedule a physical room for the meeting? If so why, it all seems so virtual!
  
  - IS it easy to make decisions? Even unpopular ones?
  
  Regds, W.

• Anonymous
  February 22, 2005
  Nice write-up, Chris. Can you elaborate a little more on the firewall issues and what can be done to share a session? I have never been able to share a session over the internet with OneNote (even though a myriad of other programs have no problem through my firewall) and would love to get this working. When I try to share a session it just errors out with no real indication why.
  
  Thanks.

• Anonymous
  February 22, 2005
  Like most other users of OneNote (college students), basic functions are enough. But I really do wish that there was a 'mapping' feature - tree-like, Windows Explorer-like - so that I can view and move my files easily.

• Anonymous
  February 23, 2005
  I should've been more specific and more clear.
  
  I see the same view of my mail (via exchange) everywhere i go. Even if i'm offline, because the data is cached. Heck it even works over http now so i don't even need to pull out my smart card that often anymore. And it deals adequately with stuff being authored at multiple places where i use my same exchange account.
  
  I want onenote to use that "universallly available mailbox" as a store or at least provide those semantics.
  
  If i use windows offline folders for this -- how does it deal with the conflict issues if i go into work today, don't take my laptop, edit some notes ,go home and edit some notes before going online. I now could have conflicting updates.

• Anonymous
  February 23, 2005
  Shared Sessions - Very Handy for Conferences -especially when you are the MC or Chair etc.. can have your people at the back of the room monitoring the audience and suggesting, reminding, solving, issues and keeping the Chair in the picture .. also great for workshops and Q &A sessions... everyone usually misses one question - or the context of the question... or all the listeners take the same emphasis.. now they can arrange to listen for different things and help each other with note-taking- used it recently at a conferece and it worked a dream... used it across a Hosted Sharepoint solution so at the end of the conference we had all of our Notes, Suggestions, Q&A and speaker notes .. invaluable material for the next conference!

• Anonymous
  February 23, 2005
  I just tried this fantastic feature with a PC, a laptop and my tablet pc. Great! Thanks for the hint, I had never tried that feature.
  
  One issue, though: I played around a bit with different shared sessions. Originally, a page was shared by one system, then the others joined. All three made changes to the page, then the original host system left the session. The other two made further changes to the session. Now, when the first host system reconnected to the session, a copy of the original page was created! Fine, no data lost here... but now I have two slightly different versions of the same original page in my notebook... and it's not even easy to see how that came to be. Any experience with that scenario?

• Anonymous
  February 23, 2005
  And moments later, another problem: I was trying to use a marker pen in conjunction with the "Use the pen as a pointer" function to highlight a piece of text. Surprisingly, this doesn't work because the yellow mark that the pen leaves appears at different locations on all three systems! Certainly something to be aware of when sharing with other real people.

• Anonymous
  February 23, 2005
  Hi Chris, stumbled across your website while trying to solve my problems... so here's my info/feedback on how I use OneNote:
  
  I'm a highschool teacher, use an LCD projector in class to give notes (often, my pages have clippings of old exam quesitons that I demo how to solve).
  
  I want to post the class notes so that students can focus on what I'm doing in class rather than frantically copy notes (or if someone is away, they have access to what we covered). BUT I'm finding this REALLY diffcult to do. Here's what I've tried:
  
  .PDF's Doesn't really work. I do a lot of highlighting and when converting to pdf, the highligted areas mask out the text underneath. (I know this isn't a OneNote problem... but it ends up being "my" prolem :)
  
  .mht Couple problems: Mac users can't view them (And I'm a Mac fan), AND the files don't work when hosted on an Apache server (there is a fix/workaround, but because .mht isn't that popular, nobody's really fixing it) The mht files don't work when hosted on .Mac or from the inbox of a gMail account (both Apache servers).
  
  REALLY what I need is for microsoft (and the MS MacBU) to write a OneNote viewer. (like the journal viewer) (AND don't leave the Mac users out in the cold ;-)
  
  Hope my feedback was useful. It seems like a typical and growing situation for tablets and OneNote (teacher use).
  I'm figuring that inthe next 10 years,... tablets/OneNote (or at least Journal) will replace the overhead projector.
  
  thanks ian :)

• Anonymous
  February 23, 2005
  The comment has been removed

• Anonymous
  February 23, 2005
  The comment has been removed

• Anonymous
  February 23, 2005
  Oliver Sturm's weblog - Shared sessions in OneNote

• Anonymous
  February 23, 2005
  We're in the entertainment business and we used OneNote extensively to plan and deliver a CD album for a recording artist. We used it to keep our thoughts flowing and still make sense of it all afterwards.
  
  Now, we're using it to conduct meetings with our partners in Africa and California to hold creative meetings in conjuction with a conference call.
  
  I've said it before and I'll say it again. The TabletPC, OneNote, SharePoint and another application have changed my life.

• Anonymous
  February 23, 2005
  Any chance you'd have an answer to this question: I can add additional pages while in a shared session, but I can't find a way to remove a page from the session again. Can I do this somehow?
  
  I thought it would be a good idea if I wanted to distribute a page (that I had previously prepared) to other participants, I could simply share it for a moment and then "unshare" it, so nobody could fool around with it.

• Anonymous
  February 24, 2005
  The comment has been removed

• Anonymous
  February 25, 2005
  Quick note to say great blog entry. Very useful. Is there a MS knowledgebase with this "real world" type stuff in ?

• Anonymous
  February 25, 2005
  PJ: Yes, there are loads of articles about great ways to use OneNote on the Office web site. From OneNote, try Help/Microsoft Office Online, then click OneNote on the left. You can also try this: http://tc23.iponet.net/en-us/FX010858031033.aspx
  

• Anonymous
  February 25, 2005
  The comment has been removed

• Anonymous
  February 26, 2005
  Chris: On the shared notes side, as executive producers of the CD, my business partner and I, would be in the studio listening to the artist record, and take notes of our comments on the fly. Then, we showed them to the producer. The other thing that was really cool was being able to use the audio record function in OneNote to pinpoint the location that our note was referring to. All we did was take the a monitor feed from the producers console and plug it into the mic port on one Tablet.
  
  It was also kind of cool to see us writing the same comment about a particular phrase from time-to-time. Though I am not a writer, I do know that the other executive producer used a shared session to write and modify lyrics as well.
  
  All our work was stored on a hosted SharePoint site. This included graphics, photos, lyrics, label copy, ISRC numbers, schedules, etc.
  
  We're on our second album now and the same process is happening except, that in a few instances, where I have not been in the studio, I simply take the other executive producers notes with audio and append my comments. Ultra cool way of doing this.

• Anonymous
  February 26, 2005
  Chris, I am glad you are writing again. Keep your insightful entries coming, we read on.

• Anonymous
  February 26, 2005
  <DIV>I have a love/hate relationship with Microsoft.&nbsp; XP lets me get things done, most of the time, except with the darn security patch that conflicts ...

• Anonymous
  February 28, 2005
  Chris,
  
  Welcome back. It's been too long. As a freelance writer, OneNote has been integral in keeping my projects on track. I've never used the shared session feature, but can see how it would make meetings run smoother.
  
  I too would like to see another means of saving a page or section, internal links, and true tables. But be careful you don't become too feature-rich as it still needs to be easy to remain an effective tool.
  
  Finally, though I'm glad to have you back, I hope it doesn't mean that the next versions of ON has been pushed back. I'm eager to see what you'll throw at us next!

• Anonymous
  March 02, 2005
  Thanks for the great write up. I find myself using it and evangelising it quite a bit. For many, the hierarchical nature of the My Notebook, Folder, and Sections is not immediately clear.
  
  I would love to see richer support for tables. The ability to sort/filter in a one-note table while keeping it light weight (non-Word like) would be great!
  
  Keep up the great work,
  
  Kyle

• Anonymous
  March 03, 2005
  Since you are asking, the main use I have for ON is in preparing courses and lectures.
  I am a University Prof. and I tend to prepare my courses from scratch (ie not from a textbook).
  I collect lots of info, from all over the place, and sometime paste, sometimes link to files I download, sometime scan some stuff, always with some comments on why this seems important and how I might use it.
  
  When things being to emerge, I give a page to each topic that I have identified, and copy all the relevant bits there. I rearrange the pages until they become class-session sized .
  At the same time, I build a list of papers I want students to read and why.
  Ultimately, I have one page per class session, from which I build the actual lecture plan, and write the lecture up. At that time I use the links to recoved the complete info.
  
  In parallel with defining the pages, I define subdirectories in Windows explorer that correspond to the successive topics (though one directory may cover more than one class session). and of course, include links to those too.
  
  As others before, I would be happy to have a better tool to handle links of all types: easier to enter, better looking...
  
  

• Anonymous
  March 04, 2005
  The comment has been removed

• Anonymous
  March 04, 2005
  The comment has been removed

• Anonymous
  March 05, 2005
  The comment has been removed

• Anonymous
  March 05, 2005
  AH. Since I wrote that, I have been finding other ways to make things happen, but the revelation that SECTIONS are files is probably key.
  
  I still have the feeling that this is what I have been looking for all my life, but I can't quite get it working the way it should work. But I think the real key is sections; I presume I can import them from one machine to another.
  
  Here is what I want to do: Open (and preferably keep open) OneNote on my main communications (desktop)machine. Use that to collect information, URL's, write my daily journal, do paragraphs for upcoming essays, scenes for novels, whatever I used to do on paper.
  
  Now it's time to walk the dog. I want to be able to pick up my TabletPC, which is docked and on my internal network, do something simple, and have my OneNote comprehensive file available on it. Now I go for a walk, stop at the local Starbucks, play with wireless email, etc., and be able to make OneNote notes. Now I go home. I dock the Tablet.
  
  With Outlook, in order to do all that, I must, before I leave, CLOSE OUTLOOK then copy the outlook.pst file over to the tablet. It's enormous so that takes several minutes, and that long transfer time is one reason I don't do this as often as I would like (but I always do before a trip). When I get back home the reverse happens: copy the outlook.pst back to the main desktop. This keeps Outlook 2003 synchronized between machines and incidentally makes a backup copy.
  
  With OneNote I am unsure what to do to accomplish this result.
  
  Finally: I need to learn the shared section trick. I haven't been able to make it happen, possibly because I am logged on to each machine under the same user name? I would like to have OneNote open on the Tablet for ink notes taken while I am on the phone or get a sudden whim, and have those easily go over to the main deskptop. I wouldn't really MIND having to cut and past but I am not even sure how to do that. Perhaps have a Section on the Tablet for that, save it, and import it to the desktop?
  
  It is all a bit confusing. With Word I sort of know how to move documents back and forth because each is a file. I used to do that a lot. But the notion of being able to keep a journal that is partly handwriting and partly typescript and includes pictures and other stuff is very interesting. We're about to go to Italy for a research trip for a novel and I want to get this down cold before we go...
  
  

• Anonymous
  March 06, 2005
  I almost understand what you say below, but not quite:
  
  There are several methods, but if your two machines at least occasionally have a network connection with each other, you can try making the "My Notebook" folder a shared folder on one machine, then access that folder from your second machine and set it to be available offline (this is the key step). Then on your second machine, set the notebook location in OneNote's Tools/Options to point to that folder you made available offline. In this configuration, be careful not to modify the same section on both machines before syncing the two of them otherwise you will have a conflict that is tricky to resolve.
  
  Another way is to have one or more sections that you simply copy as files between machines. Just drop them in the My Notebook folder on each machine before starting OneNote. This is all the same as say, Word. The fact that OneNote saves all the time doesn't affect any of this. It is similar to hitting ctrl-S in Word every 30sec and again automatically when you close OneNote - we just do it for you.
  ===
  
  But the folder method may work. I keep thinking this is the program I have been looking for all my life, and if I can only understand how it works...
  
  

• Anonymous
  March 06, 2005
  How long are we talking before OneNote 2.0 is out?

• Anonymous
  March 06, 2005
  The comment has been removed

• Anonymous
  March 07, 2005
  Chris- Just did my first shared session thanks to your write up. It works quite well and is a great facilitation tool for a de-centralized team like I have. Here is what we all agreed would be really helpful - in parentheses, next to each partipants name, show what page they are currently looking at. We were sharing about five pages and it sure would have helped to know who was where in the document.
  
  The other thing that would be really helpful to me is to see some more images of how people are creating their pages. The one by the psych professor above was really great. I have already looked at all the templates on Microsoft's site but they are all pretty mundane. Would like to see what more users are doing with OneNote.

• Anonymous
  March 07, 2005
  Great to see some web space dedicated to OneNote, thanks.
  
  I wanted to share my experience with OneNote's Shared Sessions, so here it goes. I'm am college student tutoring and majoring in math. When first implementing tablet pc technology into my tutoring sessions I'd constantly hover over a student guiding him/her through each step required to solve a problem. Certain steps almost demanded drawing a graph or simply jotting down a formula to spark some insight for solving a problem. Well, that meant every time my participation was required I had to produce hints on scratch paper or a separate tablet pc and then show the student. Such a small divergence was replaced with a smooth flowing shared session in OneNote.
  
  Oh, I love it. My tutoring now has me sitting away from the student; sometimes I'll go as far as into the next room, and still be able to help the student. This seems to produce a testing environment where the student feels alone, yet I can always paste that significant graph or write in an essential point to pull a student out of confusion. Shared Sessions allows for more of those "aha!" moments under this method of tutoring. A few regular students have mathematically matured in part, I believe, because of this unique avenue of providing hints. The students begin to produce their own "aha!" moments during exams due in part to being trained in such an environment.
  
  A future thought came to me over an email. That thought is the day when the students I’m tutoring all have OneNote in their own home along with a tablet pc or maybe a Wacom tablet so that tutoring can take place over the phone while sharing a session. This would mean lower fees for my students since they wouldn’t be required to pay for my traveling expenses, or I could dedicate more time to studying myself or tutoring if driving around all weekend from house to house is no long necessary.
  
  I recently entertained purchasing OneNote licenses to provide regular students/clients with this sharing capability, but then the hardware would be another issue. One thing is for sure though; should I start a formal math tutoring business on the side I’d sure invest in the both OneNote and the hardware.
  
  Thanks for allowing me to share my Shared Sessions….
  
  And before I forget, how about shape recognition in OneNote’s future release? Math/Science fields would love the OneNote team even more--if that is possible.
  

• Anonymous
  March 08, 2005
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• Anonymous
  March 08, 2005
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• Anonymous
  March 09, 2005
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• Anonymous
  March 09, 2005
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• Anonymous
  March 15, 2005
  Sharing applications has been a feature of MSN Messenger and other messaging products for a long time. From what I know it has not been so successful. Not many people share applications it seems. Even in MSN Messenger 7 beta the feature has been hidden more under Activities. Ok, I know that Onenote sharing is not the same but what I want to ask is:
  A. Why hasn't application sharing been so successful Are you researching the reasons? in other products Like MSN Messenger? What are the top issues. For example, why wasn't browsing the web together been successful? Why has the Browsing the Web Together feature been removed? (Browsing the web together allows many persons to view a single IE window and well browse together in MSN Messenger).
  B. Is the OneNote team considering the issues that customers face in these messaging products and are they dealing with them in their design of OneNote?
  C. Why not implement sharing in other more popular products in Office like Word. Word should have had this feature for a long time now. What I mean is that sharing in OneNote is only the beginning. It should have been in other products much before.
  I hope that you will work on that. And while talking about sharing, you should make sharing info amongst the different Office apps better. What about notes that you store in Office Outlook for example? Why should they be isolated from OneNote. More integration please.
  And a marketing question: Why don't you bundle OneNote with any Office edition, like the Student Edition. Isn't that a wrong move on your part. Nobody knows about OneNote now.

• Anonymous
  March 15, 2005
  Peter: good point.
  
  Nektar: lots of questions. I don't know the actual state of app sharing in MSN Messenger. I do know that the scenario of starting an IM session and then deciding to share an app doesn't seem all that compelling to me. It seems more likely I might be in the app and then want to share. Also, the sharing works via Netmeeting, which is not able to traverse firewalls as Messenger can, so often app sharing will fail even though IM works. Another question - what scenario calls for sharing office apps, e.g. Powerpoint or Word? Are you going to present or co-author in real-time, without a way to talk? Maybe, but it still seems odd to start this from Messenger , which isn't yet widespread in business settings - at least not so much for business use, where most of Office is used. The OneNote scenarios as I described above seem to make more sense to me - you're in a meeting anyway, which is real-time already. And people want notes. And onenote is a better place to capture drawings and text and so on than Word or PPT. It seems a more natural fit for what OneNote does.
  
  App sharing and what OneNote does are two different technologies. In App sharing, there is one app running, and the other people get pictures of what the app is doing. When they take control, their mouse and keyboard commands are sent to the other machine to remotely control the app. With Onenote, everyone has their own copy of Onenote running, so they can work on the shared surface, or access other notes, or whatever. Also, at the end of the meeting, they have a copy of what happeneed. When app sharing ends they have nothing, so the incentive to participate is lower. Onenote was architected to enable multi-user editing and file sharing/merging, and other apps were not. So it is pretty hard to add this feature to other apps the way OneNote does it. The "app sharing" method is one of the only ways to do it.
  
  Finally, tighter integration with Outlook is on our roadmap to be sure. As to why we are not in the Office suite, you can read more about that here: http://blogs.msdn.com/chris_pratley/archive/2004/01/30/65463.aspx
  

• Anonymous
  March 17, 2005
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• Anonymous
  March 17, 2005
  Mario - yes, that's the logical next step for the future. In 2003SP1, we do the following to get both persistence and real-time:
  1. put a section on Sharepoint (or file share)
  2. have everyone open it so they each see the same notes on each machine.
  3. the person who has the write lock (i.e. can type in the sharepoint-based section) starts a shared session from a page in that section.
  4. The others open the invitation while viewing a different section (any section, since they will be throwing away the shared pages afterward)
  5. work on the shared pages during the meeting as normal. At the end of the meeting, the person who started the session will keep the shared page since for them it is in the right place. Everyone else deletes it (not required, but it reduces confusion for them). Those people can then click into the sharepoint-based section and see the page there since the originator's machine put it there for all of them.
  
  Of course if you don't care about real-time, just shared content, you can just use the sharepoint-based section and as long as you aren't trying to use it at the same time it should work pretty well (using it within a minute of each other causes someone to get locked out from editing it). Marrying this with realtime or even just no write-locks would be very cool - I agree.
  

• Anonymous
  July 16, 2005
  With the start of&amp;nbsp;the new fiscal year at Microsoft we started planning a number of recurring meetings...

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• Anonymous
  December 03, 2006
  First, let me point out that Owen Braun is blogging now. He's the lead program manager on my team responsible

• Anonymous
  December 03, 2006
  First, let me point out that Owen Braun is blogging now. He's the lead program manager on my team responsible

• Anonymous
  November 09, 2008
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