Using Microsoft OneNote Across Multiple PC’s using Amazon S3

I love Microsoft OneNote, and use it on a daily basis to record any ideas I have, things I find on the Internet etc…

The issue is, that, whilst using it at home is great, I sometimes also have "brain waves" when I’m out and about on my laptop, or at work.
I needed a way to share my notebooks across the internet.
OneNote already offers functionality that easily lets you place you Notebook on a shared drive, and have multiple users of it.
We use this regularly in our office, and it has proved very useful for keeping everyone up to speed on various software component developments.

Sharing the notebook across the internet is somewhat more difficult.
It can be done if your web host supports WebDav, by mapping a network drive (which is similar to the method we will be using) to an FTP site, or VPN to your shared drive etc…. but all this can be a bit complicated.

Enter Amazon S3 & Jungle Disk

Jungle Disk is a way of providing an interface to Amazon S3.
Out of the box, S3 doesn’t have any easy way of putting data into it. That’s where JungleDisk comes in.
With Jungle Disk, you can map a network drive, to any of your "buckets" on Amazon S3, so they behave just like local drives!

Jungle Disk costs just $20 for the desktop edition

This enables us to share the notebook across the internet, by following these steps:

1. Sign up to JungleDisk (which will also create you an Amazon S3 Account if you don’t already have one)
2. Create a bucket, and map it to a network drive using JungleDisk.
   See Screenshot:

   

3. In OneNote, bring up the notebook properties, and click "Change Location"

    

4. Navigate to the Network Drive and select (or create) a folder for your Notebooks.
   This will then begin "synchronizing" your files to this new location.
   OneNote keeps a local copy also, for offline editing, and synchronizes the files every few minutes, or upon closing

1. Woo Hoo!!
   You now have a remote OneNote notebook that other PC’s can connect to.
   You will need to install JungleDisk desktop on the other PC’s, and set a mapped network drive to your bucket, but then you can open the notebook as per normal (File –> Open –> Notebook) and OneNote will recognise it as a remote notebook, keep a local copy, and sync to S23

Please leave me a comment and let me know how you get on!