December 2005 - Posts

back soon...
29 December 05 10:57 AM | michaelaffronti | 0 Comments   

Thanks to everyone for their great feedback on our recently-announced RSS integration! It's great to see this level of interest and support from the community. I'm on vacation this week but will be addressing your questions and comments in my next post Read More...

Filed under: General

RSS Aggregation - Part 1: The Partnership
22 December 05 03:55 PM | michaelaffronti | 32 Comments   

RSS (Really Simple Syndication) is meant to provide users with an easy way to monitor multiple sources of news, blogs, and other content which has headline-style delimitations and is updated frequently. It is an open, publicly-defined and developed format Read More...

Instant Search - Part 3: The New User Interface
19 December 05 09:19 AM | michaelaffronti | 3 Comments   

All of the user research and testing data was carefully applied to the design of the new Outlook 12 Search experience. The goal was to stay true to the tenets mentioned earlier: simplicity, speed, and always being available. The key to the new search Read More...

RSS icon goodness
15 December 05 11:37 AM | michaelaffronti | 25 Comments   

Some of you may have seen this on the IE team blog and should be as excited as I am... http://blogs.msdn.com/rssteam/archive/2005/12/14/503778.aspx Internet Explorer 7 and the Windows RSS Platform have now officially adopted the orange RSS icon that the Read More...

Filed under: RSS Aggregation

Technorati links added
14 December 05 12:50 PM | michaelaffronti | 0 Comments   

I've used Technorati as a general blog resource (as far as searching and subscribing to blogs) on the net, and have now added the Technorati links to my blog. You'll see them on the right side, and they will let you see who in the Technorati network is Read More...

Filed under: RSS Aggregation, General

@ the conference...
13 December 05 08:36 AM | michaelaffronti | 0 Comments   

So Syndicate 2005 is under way and it seems pretty cool so far. I'm sitting in the keynote listening to Scott Anderson from Hewlett Packard discuss how blogging works at HP and am really looking forward to some of sessons later today. We've got Outlook Read More...

Filed under: RSS Aggregation, General

Instant Search Object Model Extensibility
12 December 05 04:32 PM | michaelaffronti | 1 Comments   

My fellow PM Ryan Gregg has a great blog about our new Outlook Object Model and all of the cool features you can tap into using our extensiblity architecture. One of those cool features is Search, and he has written an excellent post thats a primer on Read More...

Filed under: Search

Instant Search - Part 2: The Find Timeline & Scoping
12 December 05 04:30 PM | michaelaffronti | 9 Comments   

Our research and usability studies helped us determine where the bottlenecks where in the current search process for our users, and helped us focus our new design on a few key tenets. The first and most important is that of availability, where Outlook Read More...

Filed under: Search

Instant Search - Part 1: Information Overload
09 December 05 05:30 PM | michaelaffronti | 2 Comments   

Over the next several posts I'm going to focus on explaining some of the methedology, user research, and design models that drove our implementation of Instant Search in Outlook 12. I'm going to start by briefly discussing the concept of information overload Read More...

Filed under: Search

Syndicate 2005
08 December 05 10:05 AM | michaelaffronti | 1 Comments   

I'll be attending Syndicate 2005 next week in San Francisco. It will be my first time attending the conference, and I'll be heading down with folks from the IE and Live.com teams. From their site: Themed "Transforming the Way Businesses Do Business", Read More...

Filed under: RSS Aggregation

Hi
07 December 05 10:55 AM | michaelaffronti | 4 Comments   

Hi everyone! My name is Michael Affronti and I'm a program manager on the Outlook team here at Microsoft. I've been an avid blogger for a few years already, and am now very excited to start a technically-focused blog on my work here in Outlook. I work Read More...

Filed under: General