Microsoft's OneNote is a digital note-taking app, supporting photos, annotating, web page clipping, emailing, and synchronizing notes across devices.
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Zotero
Score 9.4 out of 10
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Zotero is a free reference management tool developed as a project developed at Carnegie Mellon and supported by a small team at George Mason University.
It is well suited for capturing weekly departmental task lists. For example, each week we create a new page in a shared departmental notebook. In this new page, each department member enters his/her top 3 accomplishments for the week and the top 3 things which the member will attempt to accomplish in the coming week. We then use this page during our Monday morning stand-up meeting and it helps provide an agenda, structure, and discussion points for the meeting.
Zotero (with its good buddy Zotfile) is well suited for any researcher who wants to go completely paperless in their research process, or who wants a centralized library system to manage their research projects, including attachments, notes, annotations, sources, and bibliographies. It is geared towards academic and social sciences researchers. Zotero is a powerful tool with a learning curve, and as such it might not be worth the investment of time and energy for end-users with simple research project needs.
OneNote synchronizes across platforms very quickly. I often find that notes entered, or updated, on my desktop are synchronized to my laptop and smartphone well before I ever open them up to access the information.
OneNote has apps for just every major platform available. This includes Windows, iOS, and Android. The web app has plenty of features so you won't feel let down if you have to access your notebooks through a browser.
The multimedia features of OneNote are wonderful. I can draw pictures, add sound bites, add videos, add files, and much more. This helps me capture the full context of a note, including any references that I might need, all within the note itself. I don't have to go outside of OneNote to find a video clip, logo, or soundbite.
Zotero's MS Word and Google Docs plug-ins and Chrome extension makes the process of storing, indexing, and citing sources seamless
Zotero's automated retrieval of embedded metadata in PDFs and websites is incredibly accurate, which increases my confidence in the citations created by Zotero
The library of available citation styles is extensive and largely accurate
I love that Zotero syncs your work and citations online, which allows me to work from multiple devices (e.g., laptop, office desktop, computer labs)
OneNote could improve on its web clipping features. Evernote still beats it in terms of robustness, but OneNote is sufficient for most purposes.
OneNote could also improve on its tagging system. Its the other major way of categorizing notes, which Evernote uses to great effect, but OneNote de-emphasizes this in favor of a hierarchical ordering.
This is a silly point, but it drives me mad. OneNote's free-form editing on pages, meaning you can click anywhere and start editing makes for sloppier notes that aren't as well aligned. This could be an enjoyable feature for some, but for me, I like my pages orderly.
As this is not a compulsory tool in our organization, I would say all depends on the decision makers, however since this is a part of MS Office, I am sure we will have it for as long as we will possibly need it. However, I would not be so sure, if it was a separate product
Zotero is a fantastic software for researchers. We do pay for 6 GB of storage for each user, so their libraries can be backed to the cloud beyond the 300 MB of allowed free storage. It's low-cost, or can be free if you don't opt into that version. No other citation manager comes even close to Zotero in its capabilities, user-friendly nature, and cost, nor do they innovate their features constantly like Zotero and have open source support online
It is easy to use day to day and has become a common use application like Outlook or Teams. There is little to no learning curve, and you can use it in the way that is most suitable for you. Features like moving sections of text around and creating new tabs is self-explanatory.
once you adapt to the interface, which could feel a bit outdated and old school, its incredible intuitive. An aesthetic improvement could make it reach a whole other level, just if it does not lose any of its usability features. Its quite intuitive and the learning curve is very short.
Always available. I have it downloaded on my desktop and it opens quickly/immediately, holds open the articles I was reading on the page I was at, and is always ready-to-go for something like Word integration for adding citations
I find OneNote to perform very well. I experience quick load times and automatic updates which are two things that are very important to our organization. I personally do not integrate OneNote with other software or systems but I do like that it can generate a sharing link for other people to view.
Everything loads shockingly quickly. PDFs open much faster in Zotero than they do in Adobe Acrobat, all changes to PDFs are saved, the citation manager opens relatively quickly in Word, the tool updates with the online Zotero interface and automatically syncs seamlessly
Since it is part of Microsoft Office and used across the globe there are a lot of support options available. It's quickest to just do a google search which will have plenty of articles to help you since there are so many OneNote users but as an Office customer you also have access to Microsoft support and I have had good experiences with their support (probably because I'm with a large company who is a large customer to them).
I have never used Zotero support. I can answer the questions I need to from googling or finding others who have asked my same question in the Zotero support community forums
I’ll be honest, once I met OneNote, I knew my search was over. I found a software package that could do everything I needed and more. Pen and paper are helpful but not searchable, not private, not easily shared. Your notebook can be misplaced or stolen. You cannot use it to access websites with a click. I was a user of Lotus notes back in the day and though it had better function than pen and paper, I lost my entire notebook twice because of system issues and it didn’t have 1/10th of the function OneNote had
Mendeley isn't open source like Zotero and doesn't have well-built browser plug-ins, although it has a better, more modern interface. Zotero has limitations with PDFs, but Mendeley doesn't support them at all. For Qiqqa, it is a better alternative and is open source as well. However, like Mendeley, there isn't a good base of plug-ins like Zotero has and, as a result, suffers from ease of use.
All features of Zotero have always worked just fine to me. In my many years using it, I've never run into issues. And when I do want to maximize my use of some feature or learn more, the product support communities are helpful. It's an extremely consistent, reliable software
By giving employees this tool, each one can try to make the most out of it, and use it as they want. I know that many employees are utilizing features of OneNote every day, and it does help them to work more organized, and more efficiently.
I don't think there is any negative impact. Those who don't know how to use the tool are likely not to use it, so there is no risk for negative impact other than the cost of the license.
