Hello

I’m writing this blog to tell you about the next version of OneNote (“OneNote 12”), which is currently under development. For those of you unfamiliar with OneNote, we’re a product in the Microsoft Office family for collecting personal and business info – like a digital notebook. This upcoming release is either our second or our third, depending on whether you count SP1 of our first release, which contained some features as well as bug fixes. But we call it OneNote 12 because Office is on version 12. So select your favorite number among 2, 3, and 12, and that is the version I'll be posting about.

A little about me – I’ve been working on OneNote since it got started. Chris Pratley, who has been blogging about OneNote for a while already, hired me back at the beginning of 2001 to lead the team of program managers (currently Alex, Dan, David, and Olya). We’re the folks (or “folk”) who design the user experience of OneNote and help get it out the door. It’s been a big, fun, noisy, challenging four years. With the occasional slightly inebriated Perseid-shower-gazing event in Las Vegas. (Really just that one time, when we announced OneNote at Comdex.)

There’s a lot of really cool stuff coming in OneNote 12 – enough to fill many posts. So I’m going to try and take things one at a time, so I have time to explain our thinking, and you have a chance to respond. Since this is my first blog, it remains to be seen what my blogsonality will be like. Will I be friendly? Soporific? Illuminating? Not even I know the answer. Let's see what happens.