Using case studies of OneNote to enhance our test planning

Over in the newsgroups a few days ago there was this post.  In it, Dave asks about using OneNote in a small company environment.  He wanted to know some of the caveats, how tos and other lessons learned with using OneNote in that environment.  I looked around for whitepapers and such internally, and found this site:  https://www.microsoft.com/evidence.  This has a tremendous amount of papers from all over the world about companies using Microsoft software in their businesses, the benefits they receive and what products they use.  When I looked last week, there were 64 case studies on OneNote.

I posted a reply for Dave and hope he checks it out.

But that site really feels a little like a sales pitch, and the tester in me wondered "How can I use this to make OneNote even better?"  For this purpose, I'll define "even better" as "making OneNote testing more inclusive."  A quick survey of the OneNote hits showed 22 of the 64 case studies were in the Education market.  Wow - over 1/3 of the case studies were from schools.  This validates my personal project I completed a few months ago about taking notes during class.  Next up will be a quick read through to see what still needs to adjusted in our test planning for this market.  Much of this data refers to OneNote 2003, so we can adjust for improvements we put into OneNote 2007 as well.

And I checked with our marketing team.  We are working on newer studies as well, so keep your eyes on this site if you want to see some newer stories. 

Back to testing.  With 60 stories to read through, I'll also take this chance to create some scenario based tests based on how they are currently using OneNote.   For instance, every one of the first ten studies I read mentioned sharing notes and other collaborative solutions.  That tells me to emphasize those features instead of only highlighting the single user experience.  What I'll do next is come up with some way of sharing the notes I took on the MIT Open Courseware class and seeing how student would complete this task.  I'll keep my eye open for bugs, lousy workflow and other  areas of improvement.  I'll let you know how it goes.

Questions, concerns, comments and criticism always welcome,

John