OneNote 2007 and Groove

  • Article

Many people have wondered how OneNote 2007 and Groove work together (or not). Your experience will depend on whether you're using a Groove Workspace or a Groove Folder Share. Here's a brief summary. I'll write more later, but suffice it to say we're aware of the limitations and have grand plans for dramatic improvements in the future...

OneNote experience with Groove Workspaces will be limited / problematic

  • Groove Workspaces will work for individual OneNote section files sort of like a Word doc would, with all the associated potential for conflicts.
  • Groove Workspaces will not work very well with OneNote notebooks, because OneNote notebooks are folders and require us to open the folder. Groove Workspaces aren’t exposed that way. When you open a document in a Groove Workspace, Groove copies it from their store (hidden and not something we can directly access) out to the temp directory and calls the app to open it from there. Consequently we only see one file (the section file) at a time in the temp directory.

OneNote experience with Groove Shared Folders will be much better but still have conflict issues

  • Groove Shared Folders will work better for OneNote notebooks. These function much more like regular windows shared folders. OneNote can see all the files in it at once, you can open the folder as a notebook in OneNote. And basically OneNote notebooks will work there.
  • However, you will still have conflicts if two people edit the same section at the same time (and you’ll end up with two copies of the section file), because Groove disintermediates OneNote's ability to do merge.

Basically Groove works okay for single file document model (but still has conflicts) but it can be quite problematic for data that is represented by sets of files. OneNote Notebooks are an example, Front Page webs would be another example (although obviously less frequent).

Given the time remaining from the point at which Microsoft acquired Groove until the release of OneNote 2007 and Groove 2007 we were unable to do more to make this better in this release because it requires some architecture changes. But it's high on our list to make much better in the next release.