Integrating with a Document Management System

Just last week a new paper was posted on OneNote's MSDN site: Integrating OneNote 2007 with a Document Management System . Alex Simmons, another PM on the OneNote team, has been working on this document and it is a great whitepaper helping explain how to program something that integrates OneNote and a DMS (document management system).

I would recommend this paper to anyone who is interested in developing someone with OneNote. There are some great gems in the article such as:

Files Are Saved Automatically

Any changes made to the files are saved automatically. This happens on an interval, which differs based on where the file is actually stored:

  • Local drive: 5 seconds
  • UNC share: 30 seconds
  • SharePoint library: 10 minutes
  • HTTP share: 10 minutes

By default, notebooks are stored in the user's My Documents folder.

Working with the OneNote Cache

When OneNote saves a change to a file, it first saves the change to the OneNote cache, and then later replicates and merges it with the actual .one file. The .one files may be stored on the local drive, on a share, or in a SharePoint library. The cache enables users to have continuous access to their notes, regardless of where the files are actually stored or if the user is online or offline. Users can make edits to files while they are offline and OneNote automatically merges the changes back to the file when the file is available again. This also prevents OneNote from writing the entire file from the cache each time replication happens. Instead, only changes are replicated and merged with the actual file.

If your document management system supports SMB/CIFS or WebDAV, it may be possible to open the files stored in the document management system directly. However, if your version-history model is to create a copy for each version of a file, this does not work well, because OneNote continuously updates the open (and checked out) files as they are edited.

By default, the cache file is stored at C:\Documents and Settings\user name\Local Settings\Application Data\Microsoft\OneNote\12.0.

  • Cache file name: OneNoteOfflineCache.onecache
  • Cache thicket folder name: OneNoteOfflineCache_Files

Pasted from <https://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-us/library/aa395228.aspx>  

Nice work Alex! If people have comments on the document please comment below.