Microsoft Office Live and OneNote

At the Microsoft PDC in 2008, the boffins at Microsoft demonstrated OneNote working with Office Live (officelive.com) For those who don't know, Office live is Microsoft's improvement on Google Apps. It provides you with many of the components of Microsoft Office (eg. Word, Excel, PowerPoint and some Event, Task and Contact items (Outlook items) so that you can work without requiring Microsoft office on your PC.

Interoperability with Microsoft Office is outstanding (of course) as you're working with Office format documents. You can install a plug-in into Microsoft Office that will allow you to open from and save directly into Office live which is great.

You gain file sharing capabilities, which (although I haven't tried it) allow several people to edit a document collaboratively. Sharing a document is easy and is basically like writing an email.

On the downside, there's no support for OneNote (boo hoo!). This is a real pain because I'm in love with OneNote. I tend to use it as a free-form database, being able to file tid bits of info including photos, typed text, scanned items and (if I ever get a tablet or digital pen) handwritten text. Like EverNote, it's able to search pictures for text items which is a great ability. As I said, this was demonstrated at Microsoft PDC in 2008, so I'm waiting with baited breath. Hopefully it will be released soon (ie this year).

The only other annoyance I've discovered so far is that I can't deliver my items directly to my blog as I can with Word 2007. I use Live Writer but I'd love to have Office live be able to do this for when I'm not on my normal PC... OK make that PCs (plural). :) The writer built into Blogger is a poor second place.