Paper wins again

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• I received an email a week or so ago from Jeffrey and he made this comment: "I have TODO lists in Outlook, OneNote, and in my back pocket at all times, with the latter being the most effective (go figure). " I agree with him about the paper list in the back pocket being most effective. It never runs out of power, doesn't crash, is relatively easy to share, doesn't require a large financial investment to start and can be carried everywhere (just to name a few advantages). We use the phrase "Sometimes paper wins" to acknowledge this simple truth. Our job at OneNote is take our product as competitive as we can. We do this by emphasizing the strengths we have - searching notebooks stands out, as does integration with Outlook, sharing notebooks with people worldwide, etc… All of these are hard to do with paper, if not downright impossible.

• Each Monday we have a test team status meeting. We cover topics like our highest priority team work items for the week, status of collateral tasks, new tools we need to be aware of and items like that. Pretty standard stuff, really. We use a shared notebook to hold the information (I imagine the PowerPoint team uses slide shows and Excel uses workbooks), and most of the team members bring their tablets to follow along with the projected image. Also, if you need to give a status of a project on your plate, you can reference your own OneNote notebook with your status. We encourage, require and cajole ourselves into using OneNote in every conceivable way.

• Except one nameless tester, of course. This was someone's tablet for our meeting last week:

• Sigh. Sometimes paper wins.

• Questions, comments, concerns and criticisms always welcome,

• John