I have access to the alpha release of Zoho Notebook [mentioned here] and have been playing around with it the last few nights. Down the road, after I’ve asked permission, I may make more of an orientation post with pictures and samples, but today I just want to get some initial thoughts written down.
Most folks who have ever seen or used Microsoft’s OneNote look at the videos for this [1] [2] and immediately think, “Ah ha! OneNote on the web.” To a certain extent, one can definitely make the comparison. But yet, there is just as much different as there is the same.
OneNote is much more “loose” with where data goes and how it can be arranged. Zoho Notebook is a bit more structured — each piece/type of data is in a container. The container can be resized and moved around. However, Notebook appears to be set to handle a lot more types of data. I say appears because the menu options are huge and exciting, but a lot of the code isn’t there yet (remember though, this is alpha).
What am I must excited to watch for as development continues? One of the Notebook Page types is “Task Page.” Similarily, I see “Add Tasks…” in the Page content pallette (all the different types of stuff you can add to a page). Currently they don’t do anything. But the ability to mix and match all these various content types along with some Task Management could make this thing very interesting as a sort of project management tool. Sure, there’s already Zoho Planner and Zoho Projects, but the notion of being able to gather so many different types of data in one place has some intrigue.
You almost end up with some weird mashup that overlaps Planner, Projects and Zoho Wiki all into one interesting app… and that sums up what Notebook looks like, to me, at this early stage.
I bet the GTD kids would dig it too. 
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February 3rd, 2007 
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Thanks for the nice insights, Chris! As you said, Zoho Notebook is in its infancy (being in Alpha) and it should develop over time as all Zoho services do.
You can indeed post images of the Notebook to the blog if you want. And I will keep you informed of developments as usual.
Really nice post about Notebook. I agree that it is somewhat similar to Onenote but it is certainly better than that. And as you said, even though it is in alpha stage, it seems to be feature rich
[...] still on the fence, similar to where I was last time I looked at it. There’s a lot of neat stuff here and it can do some interesting stuff. I’m just not [...]