Microsoft has updated its versions of OneNote on Apple’s mobile and desktop platforms today with a few new features designed to make its note taking software more appealing to users of iOS and OS X.
OneNote for iOS now allows people to unlock specific sections in their notebooks using Apple’s Touch ID fingerprint scanner rather than require them to enter a password every time they want to open it up. The new feature requires iOS 8, which opens up the ability for any developer to use Touch ID as a method of authentication. Mac users can also create password protected sections with today’s update, something they weren’t able to do before.
In addition, people can now bring files they store in a variety of cloud services to OneNote, thanks to Microsoft’s adoption of a new document picker feature in iOS 8. Users can pull files into a notebook from any service that specifies itself as a document provider, whether that’s Microsoft’s OneDrive, Apple’s iCloud Drive or even Dropbox.
That’s significant news for OneNote users. Microsoft has been pushing people to store their files on OneDrive, its own cloud storage service. Opening things up to a broader set of storage providers now makes OneNote useful even for people who would prefer to avoid OneDrive. What’s more, if this feature gets expanded to Microsoft’s Office suite on iOS, it could open the door for people to use services like Box to provide documents across Microsoft’s whole mobile productivity ecosystem.
OneNote for Mac users also got a bit of a boost with support for notebooks stored on SharePoint Server. Companies can now make it possible for Mac users to connect to those notebooks, though the feature does require an active Office 365 subscription.
