After integrating Office Web Apps Server 2013 with SharePoint Server 2013, a OneNote shared notebook will automatically be created upon creation of a Team Site. What if you don’t have OWA installed? Well, I got tasked to find this out today and here’s the results.

When you attempt to activate it, it simply will not activate – push the button and screen spins and goes back to deactivated state.

Reason being is, there is a FeatureActivated event which tries to create the Quick Links menu entry (doable), but also tries to spin up a new One Note Notebook- not doable without WOPI- how do I know this: well, SharePoint is not going to be able to create OneNote documents spontaneously in any other way. How do I know this- I cracked open a little binary called Microsoft.SharePoint.dll in Reflector and went to SPSiteNotebookFeatureReceiver, and it has the following code:

Here’s a Technet reference! You know you want it.

http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-ca/library/microsoft.sharepoint.spsitenotebookfeaturereceiver_members.aspx

..and here is the Feature definition as it lives in the SP2013 Hive:

I don’t know how useful it would be to anyone, as the instructions on the feature do warn you that you’re going to need that WOPR, er.. WOPI