Sunday 8 June 2008

OnePoint: Revolutionising team collaboration

OneNote is widely recognised as a gold standard personal knowledge management tool. It is an application with an intuitive user-friendly interface that readily enables a user to aggregate information together from multiple sources and arrange it in a familiar notebook format. One of the less well known features of OneNote is the capacity to create shared notebooks. We have combined OneNote 2007 with SharePoint 2007 to create an excellent team knowledge management tool, which we refer to as 'OnePoint'. This implementation provides an intuitive user-friendly interface onto a SharePoint document library with automatically managed online/offline capability. In addition to this the ability to add hyperlinks, text and pictures alongside these document files adds significant value to a team - users doesn't always have to open a document to find information. OnePoint has enabled project teams to move seamlessly into working in a collaborative fashion resulting in increased engagement and cohesion. An added bonus, probably related to the facile fashion in which information can be collated, is that we are seeing teams aggregate not just the data/information they are using but also including the context, rational and decisions they are making on it. OnePoint is not only revolutionising team collaboration, but also reducing email traffic, eliminating information silos and being demanded by users of all technical ability!


Update: I have been asked to take down the slide deck associated with this post. Hopefully I will be able to re-post it in the near future.

Update: After a bit of "anonymising" I'm free to re-post the slides to slideshare, enjoy.

4 comments:

Anonymous said...

You are being censored :)

Ben Gardner said...

Not so much censored more anonymised

Pia said...

Hi Ben,

How do you exactly ask to get OnePoint? I am working for a multi-national company using Sharepoint and OneNote separately and we are looking into better tools for collaboration...

Thank you in advance.

Regards,
Pia

Ben Gardner said...

The simple answer is that you get OneNote 2007 installed and then follow the create new notebook wizard following the 'shared on multiple computers' option. The set up process will also create an email with a link that you can send to the colleagues who will share the notebook. If they have OneNote 2007 installed then clicking the link will 'synchronise' them to the notebook and you are away.
Hope that helps and I'll try a post a more detail step by step instructions in the near future.