Features I like in Office Communicator

pooyad — Wed, 02 May 2007 10:02:00 GMT

One of the things that amazed me when I started working at Microsoft about a year ago is that there are so many great features in the Microsoft products everyone uses that people just don't know about. I could start talking about the lack of training in general and how complex software features tend to be focused on a small percentage of users and leave out the majority but that's not the point of this post :) What I want to do is point out the features that I find to be useful and see if anyone else finds them useful; hopefully this will be the first in a series of "Features I like in .... ".

I'd like to highlight the feature of Office Communicator I found recently which allows users to connect their work IM client (Office Communicator) to their personal IM (MSN/Live, Yahoo, AOL). I've started to use this feature a lot recently, the only thing I still have to figure out is how to mass import my contacts from each IM system into communicator; will update this post as soon as find out.

The second one is starting a conversation with multiple contacts at once, a sort of blast message to a group. There are lots of business scenarios where this can be used (discuss a support incident with a group of the support team, ...) but for my particular need it's "who wants to go to lunch?" I has asked some people if this feature existed and no one could tell me how it worked, strangely enough I found it on Microsoft IT Showcase, which is a great resource on how we do things internally.

I encourage everyone to post their favorite (hidden) features of the products they use, I've found this to be very handy. I showed Anton, a new colleague of mine, the Slide Library feature and he's posted on it.

Pooya's place (in the Gulf) : IM

Features I like in Office Communicator