Any tips or advice would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks for bringing up EverNote. I’ve been paying attention to EverNote for a couple of years, and actually gave it a test drive last year. I have to say I was quite impressed! And, now that they have the iPhone app it makes it really compelling.

I guess you could say that the approach I’m taking right now is more of a DIY method. I think in some respects using an already established commercial solution like Evernote could save some time. But, what I’ve discovered is there are some really good open source solutions out there, and figuring out how to tie them all together and fit into my workflow has been like a complex jigsaw puzzle Everything is coming together nicely, but I still have a ways to go.

I also really do like the idea of data synchronization and portability. The ability to take your knowledge with you is a great feature!

Thank you so much for sharing how your system works! I actually used Microsoft OneNote when it first came out in 2003. I had great success with it at work for a couple years. I used it to organize most of my projects, take/publish meeting notes, and jot down misc. pieces of information. I liked it quite a bit, but was ultimately turned away due to the licensing costs (work paid for my single license, but I needed a solution for work and home on a number of computers).

Your comment on Office 2007 integration has me somewhat curious on what the new 2007 version looks like. Overall, I would say that OneNote is one of the better PIM solutions I’ve used. Good luck with your setup and thanks for joining the blog!

I am a very visual learner, so I too have sought long and hard for a personal learning management system that would fit how I think. I really needed tools to allow my more drawing and concept map-oriented mind to record and retrieve data. I use my pen tablet stylus as much or more than I use the keyboard.

So far, the best fit has been Microsoft Office One Note. It works just as well with pen tablet drawn images as it does text. I can even do handwritten notes and ask it to scan and convert my handwritten notes to just enter the words in to its search database so that I can locate the text using keyword search or actually have it convert the handwritten text selected to type.

The way that each tab works is that the tabs to the left are full notebooks, the tabs to the top are the subsections of notebook, and the tabs to the right are subsections of the subsections. At the notebook level (tabs to the left), I can save the notebooks to my own hard drive, to my home server, or to a server on the net with controls on who can read and write to the notebook. This will let me access the material from different computers. The drawback here compared to what you do though is that I would need multiple copies of the software if I use many computers (the license allows a personal computer and a portable from each disk purchased) and cannot access the data without the software if I am away from home without my computer.

I have not tried the collaborative features yet since I use it primarily as my own notebook. But, you supposedly can set up read-write access and have many people work on one notebook. I do often share the content in other ways though. With the click of a button, I can convert a page or whole notebook to an e-mail, Word document, or pdf to share with others.

It has some webpage to One Note tools built in to IE that will let you easily bring web related research in to One Note, but that is the only browser that they integrate those tools in to. I typically use Firefox. I haven’t found it difficult though to use copy paste and screen shot tools to get what I need to the notebook from FF though.

Another nice feature that I like is that it integrates with Outlook 2007 so well. My life is organized in Outlook’s e-mail, schedule, and task functions. I can send things to one note from Outlook and vice versa. For instance, if while taking notes I realize that I need to followup on the information with some task, I can actually make the task right there in my notes and my task list updates in Outlook automatically. If something that someone sent me in an e-mail was useful in my notes, I can select to send the e-mail to One Note.

OK, I better stop here or my comment will be as long as a blog post. lol