To improve productivity while managing unstructured data, consider rolling out OneNote 2007 with MOSS and Exchange. If you're in IT or procurement, then you may remember buying one license of OneNote in your EA or SA to lock in the price of the software for three years. Good move. While OneNote is an excellent tool for any job role that requires you to take (and eventually search through) a lot of notes, it serves a higher purpose to any organization currently engaged in improving document retention policies with regards to unstructured data.

That's because you can now store shared notebooks on a SharePoint site. Start small by thinking of this as a way to allow each team member to search every other team member's meeting notes. On a larger scale, this can translate into a document mapping solution to keep reference material like training manuals up-to-date across the entire organization. By enabling check in/check out options and exploiting the security model on SharePoint sites, you can really make a difference in how users share and store relevant project notes. Considering that OneNote 2007 can recognize and serach for a handwritten word in a scanned document as well do a full-text search of an audio recording, there aren't a lot of situations where OneNote CAN'T make your life easier.

This tool is already popular with students, law firms, and insurance agents and debuted in the Student Edition of Office 2007, but OneNote should not be overlooked by companies looking to gain some control over the paper in their organizations. From a change management perspective, however, I have noticed that the higher up you go in an organization's chain of command, the more there is a tendancy not to type your notes directly into your computer while sitting in a meeting. From a cultural perspective, I don't see OneNote being adopted widely in organizations that don't have a tech savvy management team, so any organization that thinks it's rude to bring your laptop to a meeting and is still trying to prevent employees from blogging is going to struggle with this roll out. 

Interested in seeing a demonstration video of how OneNote integrates with Outlook? Follow this link.