Microsoft Office Labs adds new “do not disturb” feature to email
You’ve seen several posts on the Outlook Team Blog focused on ways to help you more effectively manage your incoming e-mails and appointments in Outlook. Office Labs has also been exploring some innovative methods to help people manage the vast amounts of information they receive on a daily basis.
To help alleviate this information overload, Microsoft Office Labs released Email Prioritizer last week on www.officelabs.com. The prototype – inspired by Microsoft Research’s “Priorities” project – is an add-in for Microsoft Office Outlook 2007 that was built by the Office Labs development team here in Redmond. Email Prioritizer provides a “do not disturb” button that temporarily pauses new email arrival from ten minutes up to four hours. Email Prioritizer will also assign priority ratings of 0 to 3 stars to incoming mail to help users focus their attention on the most important email messages.
While we encourage you to test out our prototypes, they are unsupported concepts with no plans for inclusion in any products. Please direct any feedback you have on Email Prioritizer to Office Labs at emailpfb@microsoft.com.
Thanks!
Steve Geffner
Program Manager, Office Labs
