Jeffrey Wall's WebLog : Communication History

Sort communications by person

Jeffrey Wall — Thu, 06 May 2004 17:40:00 GMT

From: http://www.pcworld.com/news/article/0,aid,116005,00.asp

Future OS will track all your contacts regardless of the type of communication

Chief among Longhorn's capabilities is a communications history from which you can manage everything, says Paul Erickson, development manager for Windows communications. From this central location, you'll be able to sort and filter messages by various themes such as name of sender or date of conversation, he says.

For example, every time you get an e-mail from a particular person, a copy of that message ends up in the history file under the person's name. The next time you prepare to communicate with that person, Longhorn will automatically call up your message history. Later, if you use other methods to communicate with the same person, the OS will tie the resulting messages together so you can see all of them.

Communication History RSS Longhorn sample

Jeffrey Wall — Thu, 06 May 2004 00:37:00 GMT

The communication history team build a small sample RSS application for the WinHec build.

For each entry in the RSS feed the sample creates a Message WinFS item that appears in communication history.

http://longhorn.msdn.microsoft.com/lhsdk/sampledocs/desktopprogramming/shell_connect_commhistoryrss.aspx

Communication History integrated with caller ID

Jeffrey Wall — Thu, 06 May 2004 00:25:00 GMT

http://www.microsoft.com/presspass/features/2004/may04/05-03WinHec.asp

In addition to the hardware, the software was integrated with the process so that users could get rich caller information such as their communications history with the caller (for example, via a pop-up window on-screen with all the voicemail and e-mail history from that person), based on the caller ID. While some of the elements themselves weren't new, "Athens" was unique in bringing together the software, hardware, peripherals and the design to pull everything together.

Communication History at WinHec questions

Jeffrey Wall — Wed, 05 May 2004 20:38:00 GMT

The dev manager on my team did a presentation at WinHec today. The presentation covered some of the work that we are doing around the communications experience in Longhorn.

In the Q&A there were some good questions asked about Communication History that were well answered...

Q: Given the functionality around Communication History, how does this relate to Outlook and Outlook Express?

A: First and foremost, we are providing a platform for communication applications to write to a common store using common schemas. This simplifies the job for ISVs – as they don’t have to all build separate stores, schemas and APIs – they’re built-in in Longhorn. Communication history is the default UX to view logs about a person. And as the data is available to all apps, future versions of Outlook Express, Outlook and other communication apps can expose not only mail messages but voicemails, telephone logs, faxes, IM logs, etc. as well.

Q: How does data in Communication history work with Exchange?

A: Communication history shows data aggregated from multiple sources – data from mail servers sync’ed to WinFS would be one of those sources.

Q: Does Communication history meet archiving requirements for financial services industry?

A: We can’t speculate on whether the default Windows UX will meet the stringent logging requirements of the financial services or military customers. This is a platform and all the right hooks (WinFS APIs) are available for ISVs to build solutions that do logging.

Longhorn at WinHec in the trade rags

Jeffrey Wall — Wed, 05 May 2004 19:18:00 GMT

From:

http://www.microsoft-watch.com/article2/0,1995,1581874,00.asp

The intersection of telephony and PCs. At last year's WinHEC, the "Athens" communications PC prototype, co-developed by Microsoft and Hewlett-Packard, stole the show. This year, Microsoft is promising to talk more about built-in Longhorn capabilities, such as voice over IP (VOIP) and call control for Bluetooth-enabled devices.

Communication History

Jeffrey Wall — Tue, 02 Mar 2004 01:28:00 GMT

Part of what makes working at microsoft great is the ability to switch teams and roles - all without uprooting your life. Fairly recently, I made the switch to the 'dark side' of Program Management from Software Design.

I now work on a part of Windows Longhorn called communication history. Here's a PDC (October 2003) view:

http://msdn.microsoft.com/library/en-us/dnaero/html/wux_topic_contacts7.gif

And here is the larger article that helps to frame communication history.

http://msdn.microsoft.com/Longhorn/understanding/ux/default.aspx?pull=/library/en-us/dnaero/html/wux_topic_contacts.asp