I've made no secret of the fact that I'm a huge fan of OneNote.  I've blogged about OneNote for project team collaboration, about how OneNote should be your ultimate Office tool, and tweeted about how much OneNote rocks.  I think I've also made it pretty clear that I'm a fan of SharePoint.  I won't bother trying to recap the years of posts I've made about that subject, but I've written on multiple blogs (Atlanta .Net Regular Guys and Matt Ranlett's SharePoint and Office Blog), I've written two books (Professional SharePoint 2007 Development and Social Computing with Microsoft SharePoint 2007), written articles for Window IT Pro and ASP.Net Pro magazines, and more.  The target of this blog post is to tell you a little more about the power you get from combining these two products and how you can use freely available Internet tools to collaborate outside of a corporate environment

Did you know that you can have 100% free access to the Office Live Small Business through the Internet?  Would you be more interested if I told you that the Office Live Small Business was a SharePoint site where you could collaborate on lists and documents?  While there is a lot you can do with your free Office Live Small Business account, I'm going to focus on one part of the group collaboration story.  You can create lists, upload and share documents, and expose group calendars.  You can add alerts to any of these to notify you when items change.  You can add users and specify their levels of access.   The interface might take a little getting used to, but you have access to all of the SharePoint functionality you normally see inside a corporate intranet only this is available online and for free.

[Full Disclosure notice:  It is possible that the reason I am able to get the service for free is that the e-mail addresses I have registered for accounts with belong to Microsoft Partner organizations.  I can not guarantee that everyone will receive the service for free, but I did test signing up with two different e-mail addresses and received free access with both]

Now let's talk about connecting a shared OneNote notebook to the Office Live site for occasionally connected team collaboration where the team is not a part of the same corporate intranet (or the corporation doesn't have a SharePoint site available for this use).  I've adapted the following directions from this forum post.

Prereqs for the process

• Sign up for an Office Live Small Business account.  The URL will be based on your Company name when you fill out your application form, so use a name which has meaning.  For example, my site is http://msdevtrainingcom.officelive.com/ because my company name is MsDevTraining.com
• The account you register the site with (a Windows Live account) is going to be considered the site owner and can not be changed.  While you can designate additional site administrators, they won't have the same level of permission as the site owner.  The site owner must be the one to perform the following steps on the website.

Steps to follow in the Office Live Small Business website (requires site owner):

1. In the main menu (top left) of your Office Live Small Business click on Business Applications.
2. Click on Add Application.
3. Click on Your custom applications and on the radio button at Blank Workspace and OK.
4. Choose a name like "OneNote" (no spaces).
5. Click on Add, Document Library. Choose a meaningful name like "OfficeLive" (no spaces).
6. The default document template should be Microsoft Office OneNote section (I'm not 100% sure if this is really required).
7. Click on the newly created Tab and note the URL of the page as seen in this figure below - for example, http://[CompanyName].officelive.com/OneNote/OfficeLive/Forms/AllItems.aspx

Open OneNote and create a new notebook (does not require site owner):

1. On the menu, select New...File...Notebook. 
2. Give the new notebook the name OfficeLive (which agrees with the name of the document library added in step 5 above) and select the Shared Notebook...Group Project template.
3. The New Notebook Wizard will then ask who will use the notebook.  Specify that Multiple people will share the notebook and that it will be stored on a server(SharePoint document library, [...])
4. Path = http://[CompanyName].officelive.com/OneNote.  This location is derived from the URL of the document library created in step 5 above.  In gray text underneath the path input box, you should see the suggested full path to the document library: http://[CompanyName].officelive.com/OneNote/OfficeLive/. 

When you click the Create button and after you log in once or twice, the connection should be made.  It's possible that you will be prompted that the document library already exists and that you need to hit OK to accept this fact. Once the notebook is connected in OneNote, you should see a green connection button in the OneNote toolbar.  You will also notice a sync symbol next to the notebook name in the Notebooks pane.  The following screenshot shows two synched notebooks.  The one with the green checkmark is up to date and the one with the red "No" symbol requires authentication to synch.

Once you've created the notebook, you'll have an opportunity to send an e-mail to your teammates which encourages them to open the shared notebook in OneNote.  With multiple people sharing the notebook, you can work together in an occasionally connected fashion.  I find this works extremely well with people who are not on the same corporate network and not on the same project team.