I had grand hopes of being able to securely access my Onenote notebooks using Outline+ on my iPad. Since Microsoft’s own Onenote app is lacking and no other iPad Onenote app supports Sharepoint integration, I decided to try out Box as a cloud tool to sync notes. As I wrote here, Box appears to be the service with the greatest focus on security and the business space. Additionally Outline+ is arguably the best Onenote app for the iPad and it claims to support Box sync’ing. With these assumptions in mind I embarked on a business trip with just my iPad, my Adonit Keyboard and Outline+ with Box integration to test out the ability to efficiently and securely access my Onenote Notebooks. I am sorry to report that the experience was generally a failure. Read on to learn why.

I had hoped that Box and Outline+ would provide a secure and automatic way to leverage Outline+ and Box on my iPad. Unfortunately I was disappointed in what I found. I connected Box to Outline+ and took two days of notes. The notes successfully sync’ed to Box such that my team-mates could see the notes individually. This was possible because they had Box’s notification featured turned on that sends an email each time a file is added to a shared Box Directory. This was cool in that each of my team mates could open my Onenote Notes created with Outline+. What they could not do was connect their own desktop versions of Onenote to a shared notebook on Box. I tried to do this myself when returning to my office and my desktop version of Onenote. I simply was not able to connect a Onenote notebook to my desktop version. I could see and edit individual notes, but I could not create and maintain the Onenote infrastructure that you have when storing Onenote Notebooks on a network drive, on a local computer, on a Sharepoint Drive or even on Microsoft Skydrive. Because of the lack of connectivity between the desktop version and Box, I had to import my notes into my Onenote site by emailing the notes to myself from Outline+ and then importing from the Onenote icon in Outlook. This is definitely not an ideal workflow because there is little advantage to using the Outline+ App on its own; I would rather take notes in Drafts using Markdown and then exporting the note using the Markdown to Email Action.

I am sorry to report that my experiment with Outline+, Onenote and Box was a failure. The potential to combine these apps and services was a potentially secure way of sharing and accessing Onenote Notebooks in a similar way to Evernote. However, until Outline+ supports connectivity to secure Sharepoint sites, we will all be stuck with keeping our corporate Onenote Sites on our work computers.

Have you had any luck accessing Onenote on your iPad?