OneNote

Integration between conversations and Microsoft Office OneNote has existed since Office Communicator 2007 R2, but it was really a buried feature, accessible only via a submenu that most users were unaware even existed. Microsoft has made some great strides with the integration included with Lync 2013, and made the collaboration points much more obvious. While in a Lync Server 2013 conference, users can opt to start taking private notes about the meeting, at which point the meeting subject, date, and participant list are automatically populated within the new note.

The previously discussed feature is on par with the preceding version’s features, although it is definitely more obviously accessible in Lync 2013. The new addition to OneNote integration is the concept of shared notes in a Lync conference. When a presenter uses shared notes from a notebook stored on SkyDrive or SharePoint, all participants can see and edit the OneNote note in real time during the conference. This eliminates the need for a single person to try to capture all the meeting notes, in which case some key pieces of information can be missed. Instead, each participant can contribute to the notebook simultaneously, ensuring that all relevant information has been recorded. A really nice touch here is that notes are displayed via OneNote Web App through the Office Web Apps Server if a user doesn’t have the OneNote application installed. The OneNote integration during conferencing is shown in Figure 2.6.

Figure 2.6. OneNote shared notes integration.

The current disadvantage to this feature is that permissions to the shared notebook must be configured in advance and managed outside of Lync. Sharing the notebook within Lync does nothing to provision access to the notebook for each participant. Additionally, when a OneNote shared notebook is added to a meeting, all participants receive the sharing notification, but only those with access to the shared notebook can actually view and edit the notes. Users without access to the notebook will receive an error indicating that they do not have the appropriate permissions.