Using a team notebook
OneNote 2013 received some significant improvements in the client
version of the application. It also received a major overhaul in the
web app version in order to bring the browser version closer to parity
with the rich client. Based on usability studies of what many teams
actually do with SharePoint team sites, three major new components are
available to team sites: a shared OneNote team notebook, a team project
summary with task timeline, and team mailboxes.
To access the team OneNote notebook, click Notebook in the navigation menu on the left side of the page, as shown in Figure 14.
This will open the notebook in the OneNote web app by default. You can
also choose to open the team notebook in OneNote on your PC, Mac, or
mobile device. Opening it in a native OneNote client app provides the
additional benefit of making it available offline and keeping it
automatically synchronized.
When
using a team notebook, all team members who have membership permissions
to the site will be able to take notes and share content in the
notebook. Sometimes when multiple people are editing the same page, you
may need to go back and review (and restore if necessary) a prior
version of the page. To accomplish this, you can click the Page
Versions button on the View tab of the ribbon.
In a team notebook, multiple people can edit the notebook at the
same time—you will see their notes appear as they type them and vice
versa. When you have multiple authors working on content in the
browser-based version of OneNote, you can click the Show Authors button
on the View tab on the ribbon, shown in Figure 15, to see what notes various team members are editing.
As
with the other Office Web Apps, you can access a team notebook from any
computer or mobile device. Perhaps your primary work laptop has OneNote
2013 loaded on it, but you also want to read and edit notes from a
tablet or other mobile device. As shown in Figure 16,
even if you are accessing team notes from a device without a native
OneNote app installed, you can still participate and collaborate.
SharePoint team sites have historically centered around shared
documents, calendars, and tasks. However, many customers find that
email is another major source of collaborative information when
managing a project or team. Therefore, SharePoint 2013 introduces site mailboxes
to team sites so that team members can have a shared repository of
email related to their team and projects. The site mailbox is an
innovative new feature in Microsoft Exchange 2013 that improves
collaboration and productivity by allowing access to SharePoint 2013
documents and Exchange email via the same interface. With site
mailboxes, you can view email in SharePoint, and likewise, you can view
documents in Outlook. And just like sharing documents, when a team
member puts email in the site mailbox, any member can then access the
content.
To add a site mailbox to your team site, select the Site Mailbox
tile by clicking Add An App on the Site Settings page. The Site Mailbox
tile is shown in Figure 17.
As shown in Figure 18,
site mailboxes appear not only in SharePoint 2013, but also in Outlook.
This gives users easy access to the email and documents for the teams
and projects they work with, regardless of whether they are in email or
in the SharePoint site. Also, team members can add new documents to a
team site’s document libraries directly from Outlook 2013.
While site mailboxes appear to be in SharePoint, Exchange Server
actually stores the email. By taking this approach, users are able to
use the same interface for both their personal email and their team
email. SharePoint still stores the documents in the mailbox, thus
enabling standard document collaboration features, such as coauthoring.
Exchange Server gathers the necessary data from SharePoint to create a
document-centric view in Outlook for the user that includes items such
as size, most recent author, document title, modified date, and so
forth.
From an administrative point of view, SharePoint and
Exchange share responsibility for site mailboxes. SharePoint is used to
manage the lifecycle and retention of the site mailbox. SharePoint’s
eDiscovery console is also used for site mailboxes when you need to
perform searches and legal holds. For backup and restore, however,
Exchange 2013 is in control. Site mailboxes should be part of your
regular Exchange disaster recovery program. Exchange also takes care of
quotas for site mailboxes, thus allowing control over settings such as
maximum mailbox size, maximum number of emails in a mailbox, and so
forth. These quota settings are configured via an Exchange cmdlet
called New-SiteMailboxProvisioningPolicy.
