One of the great things about writing a book is that you are forced to look more deeply into things that you know about but apart perhaps from a quick test during the beta phase haven't really used.

Typically because there's so much else going on ...

Anyway there I was with a section of a chapter where I'd decided that I would write about how OneNote 2007 interacts with WSS 3.0. I already had chapters or part chapters on Word/Excel/PowerPoint (both 2003 and 2007) and how they interacted and also quite a lot on Access 2007 and WSS 3.0 so OneNote 2007 seemed to be the logical thing to complement it with.

Well the book gives all the details about how to set this up and so on, and obviously it would be fairly stupid of me to repeat that here, but suppose you have already set up a link between OneNote 2007 and WSS 3.0, does it work the way it should?

I hadn't used my standard WSS 3.0 site for my 'OneNote 2007 in WSS 3.0. screenprints so I later used the same techniques to make (a copy of) my 'SharePoint Bloggers' notebook shareable. So I now have OneNote 2007 on my (Vista) portable and a notebook that is shared between it and the WSS 3.0 site (stored in a VM on my Mac).

Now this notebook contains *private* extracts from SharePoint blogs and other documents that I think are interesting for future reference (typically via searching) so I'm continuingly updating the OneNote 2007 notebook's sections whenever I use the Vista portable.

But there's always been a problem that when I've been using the Mac, I couldn't add those items but instead used to use the Newsgator "Clippings" possibility to save away the blog items I was getting via RSS feeds for later addition to the Vista portable. By the end of a normal week I probably had about 50 such things to add and it was a painful way to spend a couple of hours at the weekend.

The first phase of me doing better by using the WSS 3.0 version of that notebook was to add OneNote 2007 to that Mac VM (Windows 2003 Server R2 running WSS 3.0) and then access the Shared Documents doc lib where the notebook was contained in a folder using the Mac VM's own copy of IE 6. After that, the particular section opened in OneNote 2007 inside the VM and I could amend it.

The next phase came when I realised I could specify that the VM also had access to Mac files. So now I can open the Shared Documents doc lib (and that folder) in the Mac's own browser (Safari) and then open the .one file for the section I want to update. This will then seemlessly open the OneNote 2007 from that VM so that I can amend the OneNote 2007 notebook section.

So I can now use the Mac as if it was running OneNote 2007 containing notebooks stored on the Mac.

As for the synchronization. It seems to work so that amendments to the web version are synchronized automatically to the version stored on the files of the Vista portable but that amendments to that Vista portable copy need to be manually synchronized (because that's the setting I have specified there) to get them to the WSS 3.0 copy. But it works and that, as I think you'll agree, is the main thing.

P.S. There is one thing to watch out for. If you have set the non-Web copy to be only synchronized when you actually say "synchronize now!", there's a little red mark next to the name of the notebook. I don't know about you but little red marks make me think something is wrong. Well, actually there isn't. All that little red mark means is that *at the moment* the notebook copy in the VM (or other PC running OneNote 2007) isn't connected. Right-Clicking and selecting "Sync now" will turn it to green and it will start synchronizing.

P.P.S. You may be wondering why I don't change the setting to "sync automatically whenever there are changes". Well the answer is obvious when you know (if you know!) that I have lots of VMs and because of the amount of RAM on that MAC (2GB) and the amount of RAM dedicated to the VMs (at least 1GB) I can't have more than one running at a time. So the VM containing my OneNote 2007 notebook shareable version isn't always available when I am running a PC (or even the Mac) that I want to access that shareable version (and I don't want it trying to attach all the time to look for new stuff, do I?).