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.