← Back to the blog

Export notes from OneNote 2007 to JIRA as comments

A few weeks ago we found out that Microsoft OneNote 2007 is a great tool for taking notes during meetings. It allows dumping all the thoughts, conclusions to the file in robust and flexible way. But, as it often happens, we quickly found one major problem. We are using JIRA for managing our projects. The problem Im talking about was how to move our notes from OneNote to JIRA without the need of tedious copy & paste operations.

Microsoft OneNote 2007 exposes very neat API for accessing the notebooks, sections and pages contents. Using that API and JIRA SOAP API we have created the tool for exporting our notes to JIRA. And we are sharing it now. Below you can find the description of the OneNote JIRA Export Add-in; files can be found at the end of this post.

OneNote JIRA Export Add-in

First, download and install binary release. It requires .NET framework 3.5 only. You can find the button on standard OneNote toolbar.

How does it work?

The idea is fairly simple. The add-in requires that section pages are titled with JIRA story keys. If that is true, outline contents are added as comments for the story declared by page title. Because one image is worth more than thousand words, take a look at the image below.

More information

This is just a first version so it has somehow limited functionality. We could designate only few hours for it but the one workflow we have implemented is pretty slick. So OneNote JIRA Export Add-in will not export attached files, will not take advantage of OCR data, or keep existing comments in sync. But it will take rich formatting and convert it to JIRA wiki markup. Once again take a look at the image. It explains everything.

Will there be a next version?

Yes, definitely. We are currently working on adding support for attached files. We would like to hear from you as well! If you have an idea how OneNote JIRA Export Add-in can be improved, do not hesitate to let us know!

License

The OneNote JIRA Export Add-in is available under MIT license. OneNote JIRA Export Add-in uses famfamfam silk icons. These files are available under Creative Commons License.

Files

You can download file from here: