From John Guin…

Task Requests from OneNote Meeting Notes powertoy

The “Week of OneNote 2007 Powertoys” continues…

One of the most frequent requests we hear for new OneNote functionality is “more integration with Outlook Tasks.”  Frustratingly, it always seems like no two people agree on what this means.  A few users have wanted a method to assign tasks to others during meetings.  The scenario is something like Alice and Bob meet, Alice takes notes on the meeting and wants to assign some of the action items to Bob.  Today I present an addin to integrate this functionality into OneNote.

This will add a task request button to the Outlook Tasks toolbar in OneNote.  You can enable that toolbar via the View | Toolbars | Outlook Tasks menu command.  If you are in a meeting notes page, you can click that icon to create a task request with this functionality:

1. It will have the TO: line populated with the attendees of the meeting
2. The original body of the message will be added to the body of the task request
3. Any tagged text will be added to the body of the task request.

Since the task request will be sent, there is nothing to link it back to in Outlook.  I’ve seen a few variations of this which use the name of the recipient as the To: field, but this approach doesn’t depend on that rigid of a notebook naming scheme.  And since items 1 and 2 above come from the meeting notes table, you will get odd behavior if you use this on a non-meeting notes page.

Example:  here is a weekly meeting I have with Mike Tholfsen:

And here is the resulting task request:

Here is where to install it:

http://johnguin.members.winisp.net/Shared%20Documents/TaskRequestFromMeetingNotes.zip

Or

http://elhombre.members.winisp.net/api/TaskRequestFromMeetingNotes.zip

And the source files:

http://johnguin.members.winisp.net/Shared%20Documents/TaskRequestFromMeetingNotes_source.zip

Or

http://elhombre.members.winisp.net/api/TaskRequestFromMeetingNotes_source.zip

Let me know what you think!

Questions, comments, concerns and criticism always welcome,

John Guin