Its interesting to see Microsoft launching startup-like products.. is this an acquisition or did they develop it from scratch?. Anyways this is something I would use; not sure if I would pay for it sometime soon.
OneNote has been available for many years, it is one of the hidden gems in the office suite. Now they are going head-to-head with Evernote and making it available everywhere: OSX, iOS, Android, Windows, Windows Phone, etc.
I interned on the API team this summer and it was as close to a startup as you'll find inside a company the size of Microsoft.
OneNote itself was launched over ten years ago as part of the Office suite, while the OneNote service is just launching and has been developed completely internally.
In which group or division were you? DevDiv? Office? I also interned last year and interning again this summer and would like to work on something like this.
We take that as a great compliment :) The service was developed from the ground up less than a year ago. Not only do we like working like a startup, we also love working WITH startups. Take a look at our launch partners http://www.onenote.com/apps. Feel free to contact us if your us on Twitter @onenotedev if you also want to be featured.
What I was able to parse from the documentation, this seems to be "one way" API, meaning that one can only post new notes to OneNote but there's no way to read notes via the API. I was expecting a little more from Microsoft in 2014.
This is James from Microsoft. ericcumbee, that's exactly why we decided to prioritize the create APIs. But we have already started working on extending the API feature set to fill out the rest of CRUD. We will be blogging about our progress at blogs.msdn.com/b/onenotedev/
writing a draft in Onenote and sending it to your blogging CMS, syncing a todo list in Onenote with a 3rd party project management service or task manager. Parsing a page in Onenote and retrieving meta data via another API to add to the page. Most of all, allowing the data to flow freely between the tools you use. There are tons of interesting things that become possible if OneNote fills out a more complete API.
Creator of Genius Scan [1] here: we are one of the launch partners of OneNote and integrating with the API was easy. Team is also super responsive and "startup" like.
To address the "one way" API limitation, I would expect Microsoft to add more endpoints over time and I think it's not a bad strategy to start with that one. Adding a way to post notes to OneNote already enabled a lot of cool integrations...
I'm liking the new API-friendly approach of Microsoft. Once the "get" functionality to retrieve notes exists, I see many possibilities for alt. clients, add-ons and integrations which will make OneNote as a platform more compelling.
We (News360) were one of the launch partners for the OneNote API as well and our experience with it has also been really positive - the API itself is pretty simple right now but has all the details right. It's a great foundation to build on, and the team building it seems really committed to keeping the momentum going.
Having external tools, both hardware and software, is a huge part of building a memory-augmenting product and I'm really happy that Microsoft is getting it right - OneNote has always been a really interesting product, but it suffered from weird positioning and always felt like an add-on to Office more than anything else. Now that it's being marketed as more of a standalone (and free!) product, I think it has a great chance of becoming much more mainstream.
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[ 4.5 ms ] story [ 70.9 ms ] threadOneNote itself was launched over ten years ago as part of the Office suite, while the OneNote service is just launching and has been developed completely internally.
You can also DM me @jmslau if you like.
To address the "one way" API limitation, I would expect Microsoft to add more endpoints over time and I think it's not a bad strategy to start with that one. Adding a way to post notes to OneNote already enabled a lot of cool integrations...
[1] http://thegrizzlylabs.com
Having external tools, both hardware and software, is a huge part of building a memory-augmenting product and I'm really happy that Microsoft is getting it right - OneNote has always been a really interesting product, but it suffered from weird positioning and always felt like an add-on to Office more than anything else. Now that it's being marketed as more of a standalone (and free!) product, I think it has a great chance of becoming much more mainstream.