Live Sharing Sessions in OneNote 2010 and long live shared notebooks

Some of you have commented on the fact that in the new version of OneNote 2010the Live Sharing Session feature has been removed from the product.  First of all we understood this was an important feature for customers however the underlying technology it was built on is no longer supported by Windows and didn’t scale well with modern operating systems, we had to remove it.  We also knew of a lot of problems people had with the feature and it didn’t work behind firewalls or certain network configurations.  Since the underlying technology was going away we knew we had to do something new in OneNote 2010 and we also understood for select customers the live sharing sessions feature was important.

What we did in OneNote 2010 was to make share notebooks ‘go to light speed’ and start syncing quickly when other people are also editing the same page.  This means that when you are in a shared notebook we are always syncing your edits and once we see someone else editing we start syncing in real-time.  We will kick up our sync interval to sync very often and make sure the current page is getting synced in nearly real-time.  It is pretty cool to see this in action where people can be writing notes together and we just handle everything.  Once the other author stops editing we turn our sync interval back to the normal time period and keep a lookout for other people’s edits and then we can move into real-time again if we need to.  Shared notebooks also have the advantage of being in the same place where your team shares content, you don’t need to send some weird IP address or config file to people, they already have the notebook open.

To get this working you need to put your notebook up on SharePoint 2010 and have your notebook be in the 2010 format and just start editing.  Or have your notebook on Windows Live SkyDrive (coming soon as of the posting date).

This is clearly better because people no longer need to go into a special mode to get real-time to sync, now whatever notebooks you have will allow you to edit & collaborate in real-time.  Many other customers were asking for shared notebooks to sync faster so we thought this was the best solution for our customers.  Thanks for your patience and if you have comments for the team please put them below.