Realtime OneNote Collaboration / Synchronization

Question

We collaborate with remote colleagues and find ourselves trying to use onenote as a collaborative whiteboard which also handily doubles as a historian of our collab sessions. The issue is that synchronization takes 20 or more seconds. This is very challenging. Does specifying a skype meeting make the notebook associated with that meeting sync in real time? is there a trick to this in onenote 2016?

Someone must have solved this so I apologize for asking a question that is probably as old as onenote 2007.

It is faster for us to share our screen and have the remote person write in our onenote using RDP (or whatever is used for skype). Believe it or not, this work OK (not great by any means but certainly in near-real time).

kidd wong · Answer

Sync delay is almost a must. By experience, desktop version of OneNote does auto-save about every 10 second of any movement made on a notebook.

So when you say "20 seconds" I guess it does make sense because your editing takes 10 seconds to upload then the other side needs approx 10 seconds to download.

If you really like a solution of making it "real-time", I suggest try using OneNote online (make a few test first). Imagine, the 10 second loading time is actually because of the "platform", from your machine to cloud then to other machine(s).

So if the platform was on the cloud, means both side are on the same platform, same page editing.

Hope these info helps. Cheers.

ruben kertesz · Answer

That makes some sense but is not going to work because we will be using it for group white boarding during Skype for business meetings. I am surprised that we were unable to use even the Skype white boarding during our meetings (too slow). I am also surprised that Microsoft creats a group notebook in onenote for s4b meetings. This made me think we could use it in real time.

ruben kertesz · Answer

One thing that is interesting is that the surface hub allows real time synchronized white boarding so it has to be possible somehow.
EDIT:This is not true. Surface hub currently suffers from the same issue.

ruben kertesz · Answer

Just FYI: Looks like microsoft whiteboard is being worked on:http://www.pcworld.com/article/3197761/software/microsoft-shows-the-power-of-its-pen-with-a-new-whiteboard-app-and-other-upgrades.html

kidd wong · Answer

happy for you MS finally fixing it, but I'm already sick and tired the strategies of MS always selling the vision of future, and sold the unfinished hardware.I'm sure you have invested quite a few dollars in it wanted to have the team collaborate from different physical locations. MS only fixing it for you after one year they have been keeping your money.all those updates, upgrades, they only keep on postpone what they have planned. remember the People app they announced in the MS event half a year ago? which we could quickly share content to selected people through the taskbar. the latest announcement is we gotta wait until the fall update.well, imo, they have been trying that since Win8 and 8.1 sharing content by the CharmBar, one function taking them years and years to correct the codes to make it work and yet not actually available. I doubt what they actually focus on, as well as the other 2 major platforms.back to what they announced this time about collaborations on the office app, I believe there will be still technical issues such as real time (so call "real time", we discussed about the 10 seconds delay.) synchronization, end up they will push the problem back at us, it's our connection problem. In fact, I don't see how difficult is that (although I'm not a programmer), 'cause we have actually seen Real real-time collaboration IRL. remember the chat application named ICQ? There was a function like a real-time chartroom, people seeing Real real-time live typing with every single letter typed in and erased by backspace. Wasn't that a good example? That was year 1997, which is a possible function 20 years ago. Sigh.

Forum Discussion

Realtime OneNote Collaboration / Synchronization

5 Replies