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Sharing Notes with OneNote: An Overview

(This article excerpted from the Eclectic Academy class OneNote. Learn more about the class here.)

There are three ways to "share" your notes pages that are built into OneNote.

• The first is to email your notes.
• The second way is to store your notes pages on a shared server. The notes are stored on a server and when you access them, you create your own copy on your computer. If you have the ability to write to the FTP area where the notes are stored, you can also put your notes back up there for others to see.
• The third method of sharing is to create an interactive session and share the notes in real time. This is what this article covers.

To share notes, do File-->Share with others. This opens the Share with Others task pane.



The first segment of the task pane is for emailing your notes. The bottom segment is for sharing via remote storage. The middle section, the part we are interested in, has two buttons: Join a session and Start a session. They each bring up a task pane.

Starting a Session

Let's start with starting a session. While this is the more complicated set of steps, it is necessary for you to understand the process in order to understand how the session got there for you to join.

Click the Start a Session button and bring up the (imagine this) Start a Shared Session task pane:



Three steps here:

1. If you need to control who has access to the session, set up a password.
2. Decide which pages you want to share. All pages to share must be in the same section. Use CTRL-Click to select the pages. The page names will show up in the list of pages to be shared.
3. Click the Start Shared Session button.

While the shared session is being started, you will get a message:

 

When the message goes away, your task pane will have changed to the Curretn Shared Session taskpane:



You really haven't started the sharing session yet, because the only participant is yourself. To get more participants, you need to invite them. Click the Invite Participants button and an email form will show up. Fill in the people you wish to invite to your session and send it. (I am going to invite my husband (Bruce), because he has OneNote on his machine, which is also within our home network.) When sent, the email looks like this:



The IP address in the email is not one you will be using or be able to connect to. To find out what IP address you would use, click the "Shared Address Information" button on your Shared Session task pane.

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I am now at the point where I am waiting for someone else to join. Bruce goes to his computer, reads his email and follows the directions to join the session. When he has joined, his name will show up in the Participants list.

We are now sharing pages. If I want to just show him something remotely, I remove the check from "Allow participants to edit". In this case, he will be able to see everything I do on the shared pages, but he won't be able to edit or mark the pages himself. Good for demos, not so good for collaboration. Usually I leave the box checked so that all participants can make changes and notes on the pages.

If either participant wants to add a page to the shared session, they move to that page and click the "Add Pages" button. No real way to remove pages, but that shouldn't be a problem as there are no limits on the number of pages to be shared.

The other option you should know about during your sessions is the "Use pen as a pointer" checkbox. When this is checked, you do not draw on the notes page, instead your mouse indicates where you are and points things out.

Okay, you are running along in your shared session and you want to change pages. How do you let the other participants know? I type or write them a quick note that says "Let's flip to XXX page - there is relevant information over there." You just have to hope that it is seen by all the other participants. After all, when one participant changes pages, the page is added to the shared page list, but no one else is forced to change with them.

When you are done with the shared session, click the "Leave Shared Session" button. If you are not the last person involved, your name will drop from the participants list, but the shared session will continue. If you are the last person to leave, the session will be closed. (Clicking the button takes you back to the (Start Shared Session) task pane.)

Join Shared Session

You can join existing sessions without being invited. For example, if you have a regularly scheduled meeting where the notes are going to be taken on a shared notes page, you probably don't want to send the email every time. In this case, you send the email the first time and, from then on, participants use the Join Shared Session task pane to join the session:



From then on, the person responsible for starting the session goes through the process above first. Once the session has been started, OneNote will recognize that there is a shared session on the port set up for use and allows you to join the session.

Once the session is started, you need to fill in two pieces of information. You will always need to provide the Shared Session Address. Since this address doesn't change for intra-network sessions, you will always have it. In addition, if the session has a password, you will need to provide that as well. Once the information is typed into the boxes, the "Join Session" button becomes active and you can join the session.

One more piece of information you should know:

Shared sessions run on a port for your IP address. You set that port via Tools--> Options, Share Session tab. It looks like this:



If you administrate your own network, you will need to decide whether you are going to always use the same port or let OneNote set the sharing port for you. For all the rest of us, the only option you really care about here is the first one, where you set up what your name shows as to the other users.