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Getting OneNote 2013 to Work With On-Premise SharePoint

Saturday, July 13, 2013 9:20 AM

*Note – This is reposted from my Surface Pro-focused blog “Surface At Work”. Check it out if you want to read specifically about my experiences putting my Surface Pro device through its paces in a pure work setting.

I’ve really enjoyed using OneNote on my Surface Pro. It’s my go-to program for taking notes, almost exclusively with the pen (much easier for jotting things down than trying to type while at a lunch meeting).

I ran into a problem when I wanted to upload my notebook to my work SharePoint. My surface isn’t joined to my work domain, so my SharePoint libraries are accessed via credentials in a browser. No big deal, just set the location of the notebook to the correct URL and enter credentials when its time to sync. Except its not that easy.

Out of the box, OneNote 2013 gives you three options for storing your OneNote notebooks: locally, SkyDrive or SharePoint on Office 365 (read: not locally installed SharePoint). That’s it, which I think is pretty odd considering neither of those really enable OneNote in a business setting.

Luckily, Nick42 over at SpiceWorks (oddest name for an IT community site) posted steps to get OneNote recognizing that there’s other options for where to store notebooks. Here are his steps reproduced from this post:

1. FIRST, create a new document library on SharePoint, and set OneNote as the default document type.

2. From your computer with OneNote installed, use your browser to open the new document library, go to the library tools, Documents and select “New Document”.

3. It should download a pre-configured OneNote template (you may see a browser popup, accept it).

4. OneNote will then open, connected to SharePoint, and “unpack” the notebook. Configure the name. The path back to SharePoint should already be there.

5. After that you can go into existing notebooks, then File, Share, and there will be a button for “Other Web Locations”

You can use that to put your existing notebooks on SharePoint. After that others can share the files too.

I did these steps and can confirm they work. Now I’m able to sync my notebooks to SharePoint easily. But seriously, why isn’t this feature just enabled in OneNote by default?! Why would we need to jump through these hoops just to enable something that’s obviously there, but just not obvious as to how to enable it?!

We get it Microsoft – SkyDrive and Office 365 are big important platforms you want to get people on. But forcing us to jump through hoops to get products to work the way *we* need them to work? Not cool.

This article is part of the GWB Archives. Original Author: D’Arcy

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