I finally had the opportunity to use the new Shared Sessions feature in OneNote SP1 Preview yesterday to do some collaborative brainstorming. As good as OneNote is as a standalone product, the addition of Shared Sessions have the opportunity to really take it to the next level.
The brainstorming session also served as a good opportunity to introduce the wonders of OneNote to the team members. I've always said that in order to really appreciate OneNote (much like the Tablet PC), you have to use it. It's a hard product to describe - but once you start using it, there's no turning back. Not surprisingly, there have already been at least three converts.... :)
Of course, anyone who reads this blog should know that such praise is usually accompanied with at least one complaint.
[ An unnecessary aside: I praise applications I like the most. Because I like them, I use them a lot and have the opportunity to see places where they could improve. If the application sucks, I wouldn't use it long enough to have anything to complain about. ]
Shared sessions can be a bit chaotic. You can make a bit more sense of things when you know who is typing what. As such, we decided that we would each assume a color, and all text we write would be in that color.
The only problem, of course, is that there is no way to make this font color selection “sticky” - it just picks up the font properties of the cursor wherever you start typing.
Now I just need to figure out where to send this feedback....