Your cloud is busy raining, try again later

One of the big touted features of Office 2010 is the integration with SkyDrive.  I have not used such features intensely but they have worked generally as advertised… up till now.

I’m working on a web project presently and I opened up OneNote last night to check a few points in my notes.  The last time I used OneNote, I had observed that my web notebook hadn’t synched but dismissed it as it was just a generic error.  It was still doing the same thing now so I decided to investigate.

After not really noticing any way to immediately figure out what was going on, I figured I’d try just closing the notebook and opening it back up again.

OneNote couldn’t find any web notebooks or they are already open.

Oh really?  Ah, Missing a notebook? Why yes I am.  Okay I’ll follow instructions and “check Windows Live SkyDrive”.

Well it seems to be there.  Let’s “Open in OneNote”…

OneNote has encountered a problem and cannot complete this operation.  What problem is that? Which part of the operation?

Needless to say, after many hours of sifting through Process Monitor, removing cookies, going through the COM components being called, renaming registry keys, killing off OneNote’s configuration information, removing OneNote, repairing Office and a few reboots to be sure, it still doesn’t work.

Of course is no surprise to me, I’m not the only one.  The workarounds and ideas to check there didn’t help at all in my case but as this is a fairly generic “I can’t do that” error, that is to be expected.

I popped open my laptop that hadn’t had OneNote started since installing Windows Developer Preview [Windows 8] on it, chose the initial option to use web-based notebooks, and two clicks later was staring at my fully synched and available SkyDrive notebook.  So it’s not the SkyDrive service directly.

I certainly could spend more time trying to isolate the problem (and that might happen later on), but for now I’m giving up.   Thankfully I haven’t lost any data as it’s all still sitting on SkyDrive, but if you were a heavy user of OneNote/SkyDrive integration (ie. on multiple PCs, the web and phone), this would certainly be a deal breaker.

UPDATE 1/8/2012 – I’ve fixed it!  You can see the details on my entry, “The cloud has been made happy again“.