OneNote 2010 vs Mesh

I installed Office 2010 on my main home machine last night, and on my work PCs today. I love it, it’s very shiny. (And as an aside, while I’m at it – docs.com is amazing).

What was my point again? Oh yes, Mesh. I’ve used either Mesh beta or Foldershare to sync OneNote notebooks since before Office 2007 came out, and it’s generally been excellent, barring the odd bizarre occurrence. I don’t think it’s officially supported (and Mesh being beta, nothing is officially supported) but it does the job.

I had another one of them today: After installing Office 2010 at work, I noticed some replication occurring as the Mesh stargate-y thing rotated away. I had OneNote open at home on my desktop, so I Remote Desktop Mesh-ed into it and closed the Moe icon, but it looked like it was reoccurring any time I had OneNote open anywhere, and all notes in the whole meshed folder (about 20MB) were being pushed up and back, and loads of Replication Conflict messages were being displayed (note to Mesh folk: if you do one thing better next time around, please, make that dialog box better - for eg, “this computer is current right now, make all the other prompts go away based on that.)

Anyhoo, I was poking around in the options and found the Notebook Properties page, closed Mesh everywhere, killed all open instances of OneNote on all three machines, then upgraded the notebook to 2010 format on my work desktop. Since doing that, and firing up Mesh and OneNote on the other computers again, no more replication nastiness.

Just thought I’d mention it in case anyone’s noticing a lot of replication straight after an upgrade – just close everything, change everything on the “master”, and then let that one replicate out, and things should snap back to normal. It seems. So far. All good!

Comments

• Anonymous
  January 01, 2003
  I'm OK with file level replication - I tend to naturally push notes into multiple sections, and the section is typically the file level (I think) - so I go wide with lots of sections, rather than deep with loads of pages in each, most of the time. (Actually, I should come up with a better way of organizing stuff, but free Search makes me lazy in all things). I noticed more replication tonight in strange new places; I have a feeling that there's more to the story than I found above, and had to un-open (er, so Close, I guess) a Mesh-folder-based notebook with lots of dupes in it ("HoldingArea"). Since closing that, no problem again. And asking me about features in any given Live product... if there's a bright centre to Live information, I'm on the planet that it's farthest from.

• Anonymous
  May 10, 2010
  I think you will find this is becuase mesh doesn't do block level replication, only file level replication.  Hence if your onenote file is large, you are going to be drowned in replication traffic everytime you changed a single bit in your onenote. Dropbox is currently my preferred way to sync onenotes, as it does the block level replication goodness. Hopefully the live sync team pull their finger out and do block level replication, or better yet, when is that sync to the cloud option in onenote actually going to say something other than this service isn't available right now?