OneNote Service API | Hacker News Reader

OneNote Service API

dev.onenote.com

137 pointskevinwmerritt26 comments

Creator of Genius Scan [1] here: we are one of the launch partners of OneNote and integrating with the API was easy. Team is also super responsive and "startup" like.

To address the "one way" API limitation, I would expect Microsoft to add more endpoints over time and I think it's not a bad strategy to start with that one. Adding a way to post notes to OneNote already enabled a lot of cool integrations...

[1] http://thegrizzlylabs.com

We (News360) were one of the launch partners for the OneNote API as well and our experience with it has also been really positive - the API itself is pretty simple right now but has all the details right. It's a great foundation to build on, and the team building it seems really committed to keeping the momentum going.

Having external tools, both hardware and software, is a huge part of building a memory-augmenting product and I'm really happy that Microsoft is getting it right - OneNote has always been a really interesting product, but it suffered from weird positioning and always felt like an add-on to Office more than anything else. Now that it's being marketed as more of a standalone (and free!) product, I think it has a great chance of becoming much more mainstream.

Awesome too see - I expect an update for OneNote on the Mac coming soon!

It's here: https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/microsoft-onenote/id78480155...

SWEET!

Wow, I didn't know that was released yet. The new version of office for mac cant be too far away.

I'm liking the new API-friendly approach of Microsoft. Once the "get" functionality to retrieve notes exists, I see many possibilities for alt. clients, add-ons and integrations which will make OneNote as a platform more compelling.

What I was able to parse from the documentation, this seems to be "one way" API, meaning that one can only post new notes to OneNote but there's no way to read notes via the API. I was expecting a little more from Microsoft in 2014.

Gareth from the OneNote team here - Definitely top of our backlog. Keep an eye on @onenotedev for updates.

Just thinking about how I use onenote. Getting stuff into Onenote via an API is much more useful than getting stuff out of it via API.

This is James from Microsoft. ericcumbee, that's exactly why we decided to prioritize the create APIs. But we have already started working on extending the API feature set to fill out the rest of CRUD. We will be blogging about our progress at blogs.msdn.com/b/onenotedev/

writing a draft in Onenote and sending it to your blogging CMS, syncing a todo list in Onenote with a 3rd party project management service or task manager. Parsing a page in Onenote and retrieving meta data via another API to add to the page. Most of all, allowing the data to flow freely between the tools you use. There are tons of interesting things that become possible if OneNote fills out a more complete API.

Its interesting to see Microsoft launching startup-like products.. is this an acquisition or did they develop it from scratch?. Anyways this is something I would use; not sure if I would pay for it sometime soon.

OneNote has been available for many years, it is one of the hidden gems in the office suite. Now they are going head-to-head with Evernote and making it available everywhere: OSX, iOS, Android, Windows, Windows Phone, etc.

Hopefully it will convince Evernote to make a linux client to set themselves apart.

That would be nice. Maybe OneNote will beat them.

I interned on the API team this summer and it was as close to a startup as you'll find inside a company the size of Microsoft.

OneNote itself was launched over ten years ago as part of the Office suite, while the OneNote service is just launching and has been developed completely internally.

In which group or division were you? DevDiv? Office? I also interned last year and interning again this summer and would like to work on something like this.

The OneNote Service & OneNote teams are both part of Office.

I'll be part of Office Online Tools next summer. Not sure if APIs are part of this team. Little bit different now with the reorg.

I don't know for certain what you may be working on, but I'd be happy to help you figure it out. Just shoot me an email (in my profile) :)

We take that as a great compliment :) The service was developed from the ground up less than a year ago. Not only do we like working like a startup, we also love working WITH startups. Take a look at our launch partners http://www.onenote.com/apps. Feel free to contact us if your us on Twitter @onenotedev if you also want to be featured.

Hi James, I'll be creating a simple app extending Onenote's capability. Do you have an email address I can send some questions etc?

Our team will be hanging out on StackOverflow to answer any questions: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/tagged/onenote

You can also DM me @jmslau if you like.

would love to have it in the API marketplace: http://mashape.com

really smart move by Microsoft!

Reply on news.ycombinator.com