Microsoft is turning its OneNote note-taking app into a blogging aid with a new WordPress add-on.
Published to the WordPress plug-in directory, the new OneNote Publisher add-on from Microsoft allows users of the cloud-enabled OneNote app to transform their notes into WordPress posts. Nearly 24 percent of Websites use WordPress, making the open-source content management system the Web’s most popular publishing platform, not to mention a favorite among cyber-attackers.
“Compose your WordPress posts on any device, cross-platform, online or offline in OneNote and easily reuse content from all your existing notes,” reads the plug-in’s description. “Manage your writing workflow by keeping posts at various stages of drafting in OneNote. When you’re ready to publish, simply pick a page and hit publish from this simple add-in.”
Once installed and activated, the plug-in displays as a new button in WordPress’ composition screen. Clicking the OneNote button guides users to their notebooks, allowing them to drill down and select the notebook pages they wish to form the basis of their new WordPress posts.
Microsoft announced two other recent integrations, cloudHQ and Equil, as it celebrates the one-year anniversary of the OneNote partner ecosystem launch.
In the year since Microsoft opened up the platform to third parties, “our ecosystem has grown to include a wide variety of complimentary partner experiences that extend the power of OneNote to a range of apps, devices and services, such as hardware and software scanners, mail apps, web clippers, news readers and tools,” stated the OneNote Team in a company blog post. Other notable partners include Brother, Epson and Doxie.
Now Microsoft is welcoming a company that takes a cloud-agnostic approach to employee collaboration. CloudHQ is a service that enables organizations to link Google Apps with multiple cloud services and consolidate all of their cloud data into a centralized Google Drive or Amazon S3 account.
The solution “offers a cloud app integration for anyone that’s looking for an easy collaboration solution, and wants to keep everything safely backed up,” said the team. “Scenarios include an automatic sync of your OneNote notebook with a folder in Dropbox, or an account in Salesforce; either of which will let you view and edit your information, in real-time, with nothing to download.”
Meanwhile, Microsoft is expanding support for more pen input options including Equil, ink-based and whiteboard technologies that digitize, organize and share physical notes and sketches. “Connecting OneNote notebooks to the physical world using digital pens is one of our favorite scenarios for using OneNote,” wrote the OneNote group. “The Equil Smartpen 2 and Smartmarker from Luidia are solutions to connect the physical surfaces of notepads and whiteboards to digital notebooks like OneNote.”
Enabling Equil support is another step into turning Microsoft’s app into a one-stop note-taking solution. “By connecting the Equil Note app with OneNote, you can easily keep all your notes together, whether you created them by writing on your Surface Pro 3, typing on your iPad, writing in your notebook, or sketching on a whiteboard,” they added.
