Slashdot Mirror
Microsoft Looks At Integrating Forums and E-mail
prostoalex writes "Scott Hanselman shares a document from Microsoft Research internal Web site on Gina Venolia's latest research in user interface design. Since half of the e-mail conversations require reply and then further replies, the model is not too different from current Web forums. Future Outlook versions might integrate the nested interface for e-mail conversations." Gotta say, that'd be pretty nice to have.
Great, we're going backwards... this is USENET, isn't it? I love that people first complain that new technology doesn't do what they want, but rejoice when new technology does what the old technology did, just at four times the cost. Really people, can we invent something new for once?
"Life's funny sometimes." "And sometimes it isn't." --Cat's Cradle
it hasn't. we used to call it "usenet".
2 1337 4 u!
>Future Outlook versions might integrate
>the nested interface for e-mail conversations
They should better work on a noob-proof attachment handling and add a dozen of messageboxes when the luser double-clicks the attachment... 'Are really you sure you want to open nudeteens.jpg.exe?'
If they'd at least integrate a virus scanner... they did buy a AV company, why dont they use their knowledge?
Not that I use Windows or Outlook, but I am annoyed about the ~100 viruses I get every day... *sigh*
--
One by one the penguins steal my sanity...
This sounds a lot like sorting a folder by thread (in-reply-to/references, time, subject). Is there any non-MS e-mail program out there that doesn't allow for that? Pine does, Mutt does, Evolution does, Mozilla/Thunderbird does... does MS really need an R&D department to tell them that a 20-year-old standard feature would be useful?
Been there done that in Mozilla. Nice but not worth the MS Marketing Engine.
How about something more useful like a generic "decoratable" PIM object? i.e. I get an email with somthing I need to do. I attach a date to it so it appears in my calendar. Not just a copy of the message text, but actually the email itself? Attach a priority and percent complete to it and it appears in my task listing. Thus it becomes "data" as opposed to "email".
And for the record, links or attachments from inside a task to an email object isn't the same thing.
I think that threaded email is only half of the solution. Some of my conversations use email, some Usenet, some use instant messaging software, some use issue tracking software, some use phone calls, and the rest are person-person.
Threaded emails is nice, but really it would be great if I had threaded multi-provider tracking of conversations. So, if a IM conversation leads to an email + a phone call, it would be great if that could all be captured in a threaded view.
Its all technically feasible, except for (perhaps) the person-person chats.
Most writers regard truth as their most valuable possession, and therefore are most economical in its use - Mark Twain
Thank you! Finally, someone clarified the issue. It's amazing how many people are waving the Usenet flag around in this thread and that is an apples and oranges comparison.
The distinction is less clear if you use a mail-reader/news-reader like Gnus. It threads both and allows references to/from each. I have mailing list topics that are threaded in Gnus and they work just like a newsgroup. Sometimes someone responds to a newsgroup post directly to me, I can use the "get-parent" operation and Gnus will fetch the newsgroup post they responded to.
No, it isn't just silly.
If you've ever been in a long multi-person thread, you know that writers will sometimes respond to more than one message in a single response. More than that, they're change the subject when the subject of their particular message is different from the rest of the conversation. This makes their e-mails more effective at communicating with the other people involved.
More than that, this research has applications to recognizing the relationship among different mails in my inbox without being limited to the things which a computer can recognize with simple pattern matching. That's useful: searching my mail store is a huge chore unless I know exactly what I'm looking for. Unfortunately, I need to search precisely when I only remember the general outlines of a conversation.
si vis pacem, para bellum..."if you wish peace, prepare for war"
Ithink that the "invitation only" part of this might be a bit deceptive. How do you ignore somebody that works a couple of cubes down? God knows you have to ignore most people in chat rooms and nearly all of them on usenet.
.sig somewhere about usenet being in aspect and product like a panicked herd of circus elephants.
Maybe if Microsoft built a user adjustable moderation system, with some meta-supervision built in it would be easier to gracefully ignore the office yahoo. Something tells me that they may have to spend a couple of bucks for a license to this, I think I've seen it before.
Some kind of control is essential, I think. I half remember a
I think this could be great, but I hope they think about it before they do it. Having most of the world's emailers with acess to a slashdot would be a freaking disaster.
Why do I have this? I don't smoke.
Grand Central seems like it would be appropriate for short emails, but the technique chosen for illustrating conversation threads (pretty much the same as the Sort Messages By Thread feature I use in Mozilla) depends on having both parent and child on the screen at the same time to illustrate a relationship. Most email conversations that I really care about are a much longer than a few sentences -- the entire body text of any two emails couldn't fit on the screen. Grand Central is trying to apply a visual structure better suited to IM conversations that take place a sentence at a time.
Now, Grand Central would be impressive if it could parse emails for quoted text, and use that to snip out sections of emails (since a paragraph of text below a quote is most likely to be a reply to that quote). Most of my business discussions tend to consist of point-by-point replies, replies to those replies, etc.
I'm not sure if MS aren't talking about something different from what most of this discussion thinks they are. Rather than showing the thread of discussion of whole emails (which we're all used to in other clients) it might be they mean something more like this old discussion of what e-mail discussions should look like by Ka Ping-Yee..
/. that, the idea is that it shows the responses to pieces of your email - the kind where someone says "see my responses inline" and responds to each of your points piecemeal, then you do the same to their responses, and so on.
;)
In case you manage to
I've often thought it would be cool to write something to parse emails the KPY way, but the heuristics would have to be pretty damn clever to deal with supercite. Specifically what I wanted was something that combined KPY's ideas with text-autosummarization , and some 'author ranking' information to produce mailing list summaries from gmane which are like Kernel Traffic and Cousins, or the now-defunct Eclectic.
Oh well, I can always wait until MS put this in Outlook 2010
Eudora now does it with Version 6. You can even set your preferences for it to not display anything that has more than 2 reply markers (message nesting)... Comes in very handy so you don't have 500 lines of message to wade through when it's a reply of a reply of a reply....
It's better to burn out than to fade away
Problem: doing this requires first solving the natural-language parsing problem. We're on our third generation of linguistics PhDs who can't find a solution to that problem, I don't think one researcher at MS has managed it, and without that breakthrough we're left with a simple threaded view again.
that email is probably better interfaced as a forum.
For some people.
I hate forums, and their uncomfortable UI is one reason. I also keep my mutt in sort-by-date because threading sucks.
You see, the #1 UI wisdom that M$ will never get is that different people have different wants and needs.
I don't care what some bigname at some bigcompany thinks is good for me. I already know, thank you, now go away.
Assorted stuff I do sometimes: Lemuria.org
I'd like to see some sort of Wiki integration with email. It would allow me to edit the message. After saving the changes could go to all the recipients and original sender and they could see the updated version.
It's remarkable what they just did to make hotmail unusable:
1. You can no longer open your messages in another window, (to have them load in the background).
2. Once you open a message, you have to read the remaining ones in order.
3. Once you reply, you need to advance through a confirmation screen, then click to get back to the main menu, where you have to start this nonsense all over again.
All because they now force you to use javascript to view a message, in effect taking away certain web features (the ability to spawn multiple windows, load in the background) and turned it into a single-interface client...one that inherently takes SEVERAL SECONDS to get from one screen to another. I realize that some of this is to drive more ad views, but they've done this sort of thing before without doubling or tripling the effort required to read mail.
hm, limiting functionality, slower response times? Sound like par-for-the-course MS improvements to me.
It's finally enough to make me kill that address, which is annoying since I've had it since before the MS 'occupation.'
So what needs to happen is for each user to have a personal "account" that displays their private messages...emails simply become another private message. then each user is an author, as well as their supervisor and can "post" their message to the general business group as well as attach information about quality, customer service, etc. then all the internal messages are posted just like here...and those responses are backed up, searchable, and available to all down the road...irregardless of changes in personell!
All you need to improve it is to integrate [like I said above] the email server to handle receiving messages into the system and sending responces to threads out...just one notch above what this board does! Oh and you get to use a browser for everyting too! and integrate it into your documentation and ERP system...get the idea! I just got fired so it sounds like a fun project!
Actually, I'd like to see someone other than MS devise a popular interface like this first, such as an open source developer. If such a release was Outlook compatible and Linux compatible (of course) and gain some ground in the business world, it would be less likely that MS will devise their new email interface and require new costly per user licensing, instead of simply offering it as an upgrade.
[Please sign here]
This would require the respondant to flag which part of the email he's responding to, no? And he'd have to do that multiple times to respond to multiple points, no?
/. and other fora that don't let you automatically quote the original it is stupidly hard, yes, but the usage is common on any mailing list because email clients are much better. Mailing lists also have a low incidence of html mail, which would be a big problem for me discovering responses.
;)
No flags are required. The clues are there in human-readable form, and for the most part are machine-readable, given enough smarts in the parser. While generally responses may be entirely above the message they reply to, or entirely below, enough are 'piecewise below' to be useful, and its possible to identify the pieces by looking for how the text was quoted (as supercite does, with regexps) or by looking at the original message - since I'm talking about summarising whole threads, I always know what the original message said.
That's probably more effort than almost anyone will expend.
In
I've found that if you include multiple points in your message you'll get a response on only one.
Not from me
I don't see a piece of software, particularly a Microsoft piece of software, making this easy enough for the masses any time soon.
I agree with you entirely. However the idea has pure geek value, which makes it a tad more likely to get done.
-Baz
If this product uses a central server (Exchange), then there is no need for trying to understand the language of the email at all. Exchange will know when someone has sent a message that is a reply to another message that it has stored somewhere. As such, Exchange will then make available the "thread data," which the Outlook clients will then render in a nice color-coded format.
INO, Exchange will track the parent ID of every message, with the root nodes (inciting emails) having 0 or -1 as the id. Everything else then builds on top of that, like a normal tree. Exchange will know what emails are replys because people will hit the "Reply" button. If the user decides to create a new email every time they reply to something, I'm sure this functionality won't work. If that happened, then you would actually need to solve the natural-language parsing problem.
You need to restart your computer. Hold down the Power button for several seconds or press the Restart button.