Bigger than a breadbox?

Since posting our SP1 Preview to the web, we've gotten a lot of requests for documentation on our new DataImport APIs -- newsgroup posts, emails, blog entries, the guy standing outside of my apartment this morning -- all asking the same thing.  “What is this extensibility you speak of?“,  “What does it do?“, and “You have a very nice apartment”.  It's a bit flattering, and we probably should have seen it coming.

At the moment, we've been working madly on the documentation that will be published to the Office Developer Center when we ship.  Given the interest in this we're going to try to make an early draft of the documentation available to the beta community soon; hopefully in the next couple of days.  In the meantime, here are some basic details about DataImport extensibility:

DataImport extensibility in OneNote 2003 SP1 is designed to address a very limited but commonly requested scenario. That is, getting data from other applications, such as Outlook or a CRM system, into OneNote. So you won’t see a full object model in this release. We provide a COM interface with two methods: Import and NavigateToPage. You pass an XML document to the Import method. The XML doc follows a OneNote specific XSD schema. In that XML doc you can specify sections and pages to create, as well as objects to place on those pages, such as ink, images, html, and so on.  

Don't change that channel, folks.