Summit: Microsoft Office to the rescue

Chris Adams

V3.co.uk: Email volume has been growing steadily, and workers have to deal with other demands on their attention like IM and telephone calls. What is Microsoft's view of the information overload problem?

Chris Adams: It's definitely a topic we look at a lot; one of the four pillars we are basing our entire upcoming Office 2010 release around is insight from complexity, the information overload that people have in their day-to-day lives now, so this has been one of the key foundations for a lot of the work we have done since 2007.

We've got some statistics from some research in the US, done by Basex, which estimates companies lose around $900bn a year through lost productivity as a result of information overload. Workers are spending up to 25 per cent of the time they have in the day looking for information they need to allow them to continue with the job in hand.

Another study done by Accenture showed that managers spent about two hours a day looking for information, but by the time they actually get the data, half of it is useless to them. The challenge is, how do we make the time to find the information shorter, and improve the usefulness of the information they can find?

Microsoft is probably the biggest supplier of office software, so how can you help customers to tackle this issue?

Outlook is the application that most people use in a business environment, with users spending on average 750 minutes a day in it.

If you look at another piece of research that IDC did, after searching for information, managing and responding to email is the second biggest thing that most knowledge workers do on a day-to-day basis, it's an average 13 hours per week that people spend on email.

But email is rarely an activity that stands alone by itself, it tends to be intermingled with lots of other things that different people do – dealing with documents, scheduling meetings, inputting business processes or sales follow-up and responses – so it involves lots of different pieces from other areas of your working life.

In Outlook 2010, we're introducing Conversation View, a feature borne out of the volume of information you get in your inbox, how do you view it and manage it in a way that's easier for the user.

We've done some internal research, and found using Conversation View reduces the average inbox by 40 percent from a viewing point of view; so organising stuff by conversation, you reduce the view of the number of items by almost half.

What is Conversation View?

It's a way that we more logically organise items in your inbox by subject, like a threaded chat, so that all emails around a particular subject are grouped together. It allows the user to go through and understand what mail items or topics or actions they have to follow instead of having to read all of them.

One of the other features is Conversation Cleanup, it looks at all the email items inside that Conversation View and removes any duplicates, so if you've been out of the office all day and there are lots of new emails in that conversation, it can potentially reduce it down to just one big email you need to read to understand what's going on.

Do you need the latest version of Exchange (2010) to use this?

You don’t, actually. This functionality will work on any mail source coming in to Outlook, so if you have a POP account, an Imap account, you can use Conversation View and Conversation Cleanup as well.

But when you have Exchange server at the back end, the great thing is the heavy lifting conversation management is done by the Exchange Server, so not only do you get this great experience when you’re using Outlook on the desktop PC, if you access Outlook through a web browser you also get Conversation View and Conversation Cleanup, and you get Conversation View on your [Windows Mobile] device as well.

Going back to our internal study, it showed that by using Conversation View and Conversation Cleanup plus a third feature, Conversation Ignore, which is basically if you've been added to a conversation that has nothing to do with you, Ignore View tells Outlook that this conversation has nothing to do with you, and Outlook will automatically move this email and any further emails in the thread into your deleted items so they don’t clog up your inbox.

One of the things that's great on the back-end as well is that reducing the volume of email going through your inbox can be a huge cost saver to an organisation in terms of storage costs.

What about help on the telephony side?

When you think about what Microsoft broadly calls unified communications, there are three main elements: Exchange server; Office Communications Server (OCS), which does voice-over-IP and messaging and presence; and then we've got Communicator, the desktop client.

Exchange can help by becoming the single inbox experience for you, so when you get a voicemail, it's dropped into your email inbox, and you have controls so you can play that voicemail directly from the inbox, you don't need to dial into voicemail to get it, and Exchange 2010 also provides a 'best guess' speech-to-text translation, so just by reading the email you can understand what that message is about.

With OCS, any of the Office applications can 'bubble up' people's presence, so if I'm in Word and I get an email and I need to contact a colleague, I can see their status is green and I can start a VoIP telephone call to that person instead of typing a long drawn-out response.

We've got an interesting piece of work done by HP and the University of London looking at the effects of constant interruption into people's working day, which can be email, IM, or phone calls, and it found the impact of these interruptions is quite dramatic on productivity.

That's where Communicator is really great, because by setting my status to busy, I can stop people from disturbing me when I'm really busy. It can automatically route voice calls to my voicemail, so my phone won't ring at all, it will go direct to voicemail.

And I can give different levels of access, so that I can let my boss disturb me, but not anyone else in the organisation.

What infrastructure would customers need for this level of capability?

OCS, if you want a full voice experience, needs integration with your PBX. We have a very software-driven view of telephony. We want to work with existing PBX, whereas a lot of other unified comms vendors want you to buy their hardware. We want to interact with your existing PBX and extend the functionality in software.

How about when someone emails you about a topic, and you have to hunt around for the context (see previous Summit interview with Gartner Research director Nikos Drakos)? Is Microsoft addressing this issue?

If that person is available, it might be best to send them an IM and ask them directly, as I said before. But if they’re offline, you might use some of our search technology, such as in our SharePoint product.

A lot of content still exists on people's hard drives, but by having SharePoint at the centre of the organisation, you can make data available to other people in a compliant way.

So for this example, you might go to your Enterprise search portal and look up the topic, and find a list of documents associated with that particular project.

This extends to people as well, so enterprise search will return a list of people who work on a specific project, and it will give me a view of people's MySites, which is kind of a mini internal portal where people can publish stuff that they work on and that they are interested in, and sometimes it is quicker to just ask the person involved.

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