Ultimate OneNote 2007

Some time ago when I announced that OneNote 12 was going to be called OneNote 2007, I mentioned that we were also part of two Office suite offerings this time: "Home and Student" and "Enterpise". From our perspective this is great news, but a lot of people said they wanted to be able to buy OneNote along with the apps they would normally get in Standard or Professional.

I'm happy to say we are now going to be part of a third suite: "Ultimate". Here's a news.com story covering it.

Ultimate is designed to let regular consumers and small businesses get all the software we offer to volume license customers. It's a lot of stuff: Word/Excel/PowerPoint/Outlook/Publisher/Groove/Access/InfoPath, and of course, OneNote. Given that it has quite a bit more in it than the current top of the line "Professional", it costs more (theoretically $679 retail, although no one ever pays the full price - duh). It won't be for everyone of course, but if you're planning to get most of those apps anyway its a good deal since as with all suites you get a really good discount over buying the apps separately. And I know its the version all my fellow employees will buy for their friends and family with their employee discount :-)

A new OneNote blogger! I'd like to introduce Dan Escapa, one of our most energetic Program Managers who has just started blogging - well he blogged before but but this is his first blog for work-related stuff. We call Dan the "make it happen" guy (when we're not calling him the "intern who never went home" - inside joke). Welcome to the blogosphere Dan!

Beta 2 update

Seems like the worst of the download and activation issues are behind us. There was a 14hr period where the servers were swamped but its all good now.

A bunch of people are surprised that Outlook and OneNote ask you to install the new Windows Desktop Search 3.0 beta, and that this beta of WDS does not have any UI (no search box in the task bar). Yes folks, that's how it is. Sometimes things just don't all work out the way we'd like. The good news is you get instant search in those two apps. WDS 3.0 will get its UI back next time you see an update from them. So if you can survive without desktop search for a couple of months you'll be fine. If you don't install WDS 3.0 you will lose a bunch of funtionality from OLK and OneNote, so please do install it.

Some people are reporting that OneNote search doesn't find anything after they install WDS 3.0. Give it time. The indexer is a little shy at first so it will not immediately index your whole notebook in this beta. If after waiting a day it isn't indexed, try making changes on a bunch of pages - you may have hit a problem where pages are not marked as "not indexed yet" so the indexer thinks it is finished before it has even started. Hey it's a beta - it will all be good before we ship.

If you get an "Access denied" error installing WDS 3.0, please go here:
https://support.microsoft.com/?kbid=919163

Be sure to read the known issues for other tips. Really its worth it.

If you want to provide direct bug reports on OneNote 2007 beta, go to https://connect.microsoft.com. Sign in, then in Available Programs scroll to the bottom and sign up for "OneNote 2007 beta 2".