Welcome to the OneNote API!

Hello, I'm Steven Novick, a Program Manager on the OneNote team, and I'm proud to welcome you to the new OneNote developer community! Our team has been hard at work for many months and we are excited to share with you the fruits of our labor and begin what we hope will be an exciting and rewarding relationship between you and our team.

Today, we are announcing the new OneNote API. This is a REST API that allows you to create rich content in OneNote and reach millions of users who are already using OneNote, for work and life, and across Windows, Mac, Windows Phone, iOS, Android and the Web. We are happy to be launching with 12 partners today, who have all successfully integrated with OneNote through our API to enhance their products and services. These partners are Feedly, News360, Weave (WP8/Win8), IFTTT, Livescribe, Doxie, Genius Scan, JotNot, Neat, Epson, Brother and Mod Notebooks. Right now, our API is focused on content creation, but we will be steadily adding new API functionality over the next several months to enable new scenarios for developers.

What Can I Do with the API?

You can start using our API today to create OneNote pages in a user's notebook that lives on OneDrive (formerly known as SkyDrive). The user must authenticate through a Microsoft Account and the authentication mechanism is identical to the one used by the OneDrive APIs; you just need to pass in an additional scope called Office.onenote_create. Once you have authentication working, you simply make a HTTP POST to the following endpoint:

https://www.onenote.com/api/v1.0/pages

to create a new page in the user's default notebook and section. The body of the page in the request is represented in HTML, but we do have some OneNote-isms added to support features specific to our service. For example, you can use the data-render-src custom attribute in the <img> tag to have a screenshot grabbed from a URL and have it inserted on the page. Any images included will also be run through OCR (optical character recognition) so they are immediately searchable in OneNote. That's ideal for integration with things like hardware and mobile app scanners. You can learn more about our API in our documentation.

We have worked with folks from Apigee to bring you an API Console that allows you to play with sending requests to our service without writing any code. This is a good way to explore what the API does and how it converts the HTML body in the request to OneNote content. We also have sample code for Android, iOS, Windows, and Windows Phone available on GitHub.

What's Next

As mentioned above, today is only a starting point in our journey. In the coming weeks and months, we will continue work hard at making new API features available. We want to use this blog as a channel to get feedback from our developer community, so we will be very transparent about our plans, roadmaps and even designs in order to get your feedback early.

We want to have a conversation with you. Some ways for you to communicate with us are:

Of course, don't forget to check out the OneNote Developer Center.

We can't wait to see what you can do with the OneNote API!

 

-Steven & the OneNote API team