Noteworthy competition

I panned OneNote upon its initial release in Microsoft Office 2003. “Beyond the tablet, what was the point of this thing?” I asked acerbically. The folks in Redmond, of course, attempted to “re-educate” me. But even after several electrotherapy sessions with Slerma Hurtcolumnistoff, I still couldn’t articulate any real value posed by OneNote. Of course, I couldn’t articulate solid food, either, but that had nothing to do with it.

Then I bit the bullet. Instead of simply playing with OneNote for a couple of lab sessions, I installed the darn thing on my work notebook and started taking all my notes in it. A few weeks later, it started to make a little more sense. OneNote is less a note-taking engine than a semi-intelligent repository for miscellaneous information. Meeting notes, Web research, even photos, and other types of data can be saved on a OneNote page that’s neatly organized into cross-referenced tabs and notebooks.

It’s designed for guys just like me who have piles and piles of paper stacked in their office and who threaten to impale the cleaning lady of she touches anything because it might upset our delicate and highly imaginary filing system. We simply keep piling more papers on top of the old papers in an attempt to re-create information stores that we already had available in different piles, only we forgot about them. If they ever excavate my office, it’ll look like Pompeii with layer upon layer of office “organization” simply stacked on top of one another. And somewhere in the middle they’ll find Jimmy Hoffa or a small apartment once inhabited by Bobby Fischer.

But speaking as an appropriately organized individual, OneNote may help, but it really doesn’t go far enough. I realized this when I saw some competition for OneNote, although Microsoft doesn’t see it as such. The first product is Info Select, from Micro Logic. I first found Info Select almost 10 years ago in its earliest iteration. It had a simple, square user interface with lots of miscellaneous boxes inside the initial square. Each box contained a snippet of text information, and to find anything, you simply started typing whatever you could remember of the initial text and the system narrowed down your choices until you found the box you wanted. Gloriously simple and hugely useful for all the minor info-trash a journalist picks up day after day.

Today, Info Select is OneNote on steroids. Literally any form of information can be saved within, but its back-end database is far more sophisticated and its UI has become, regrettably, complex. Entering different kinds of information requires accessing different parts of the application, and retrieval is accomplished in a variety of ways. However, the software as a whole does provide all the flexibility and customization that a uniquely organized individual like me really needs; it just takes work. OneNote forces you into that tabs and notebooks format, which really isn’t flexible enough.

Another competitor is EverNote. Very similar to Info Select, the EverNote software is just coming out of beta and has the best UI of all three products by far. Performance is excellent and information storage is fairly simple as well. You can even add keywords to aid in information retrieval, and searching is a simple text-box procedure.

But just as I start liking the EverNote interface, I download Google’s desktop search engine, something Microsoft will soon be emulating with technology it purchased from Lookout and has been busily augmenting ever since Google announced its offering. The Google stuff, however, works amazingly well. Installation is simple and performance is fast even on the reams of miscellaneous data on my hard disk.

Microsoft, Info Select, and EverNote spokesfolks deny looking at either Google’s or Redmond’s forthcoming desktop search as a competition to their note-organizing applications, but I’ll argue that point with them more later. To me, the competition is obvious. First, EverNote, Info Select, and OneNote all force me to organize my information within their applications; that’s a noticeable productivity overhead. For example, take something like contacts: Info Select forces you to keep a contact list in Info Select as well as Outlook. Google simply searches Outlook. The desktop search approach allows me to use the entire computer as my “OneNote” repository with no additional thought to organization required unless I feel like focusing my neurons.

And from a systems administrators approach, it’s just as obvious. I can purchase OneNote or a competitor and then devote staff-hours to training my most disorganized users on these applications, or I can simply download a free desktop search engine and let them do what they’ve been doing on Google for years. No muss, no fuss, and they’ll still love me for it. That’s not just competitive, that’s a no-brainer.