[Design] Microsoft's Grand Central e-mail interface

[Jonathan Prusky]

Very interesting ideas.

It can also be found at 
http://www.hanselman.com/blog/default.aspx?date=2003-12-21 in the 03-1220 
entry.  The blog entry is called 
"<http://www.hanselman.com/blog/PermaLink.aspx?guid=de3f5c09-7fa6-4ec6-817f-25901af7db32>Shadows 
of future versions of Outlook? -- An interesting story out of Microsoft 
Research.  From an internal alias, but OK'ed for public consumption:"

"Current e-mail tools are like looking at a conversation with a magnifying 
glass. It's easy to see the details but difficult to get an overall 
picture. In Venolia's interface you view conversations as a whole instead 
of as individual messages. The initial message is shown at the top, and the 
most recent reply at the bottom, followed by the text box to input your 
response, similar to a chat format ....
-- snip --

It doesn't stop here. Venolia has also designed the user interface to give 
you some metrics about your conversations - you can find out at-a-glance 
just who you communicate with the most, and whether you are the originator, 
recipient or a participant. You can also see a complete list of the 
attachments, URLS, and images that are found in all your messages, in case 
you don't want to hunt through past e-mails to find that one document or 
Web site reference that you want.
Grand Central is designed to help people keep track of conversations as 
they're happening, easily integrate different digital communication 
methods, turn a conversation into a follow-up task, and find and reference 
past conversations and the digital information that comes with them.

-- snip --


I have been very interested in task management and notice the relationship 
between tasks and email generation.  While I have had great admiration from 
the ideas in David Allen's "Getting Things Done" book, I don't think it 
effectively addresses the information explosion, particularly as it is 
directed at the knowledge worker.  I make extensive use of filters in 
Eudora, in combination with "more than" dozens of mailboxes.  The recent 
discussion on this list about filters and views doesn't really address this 
issue, but that is a subject for a different post.  Suffice it to say that 
each mailbox, in some sense, represents a "project." Each project has 
messages with a different status, in some ways representing a todo list.

Anyway, I like the "forest for the trees" mindset that I infer from this 
work at Microsoft Research.  While I recall conversations at OSAF about 
keeping track of URL, bookmarks, etc., I don't recall bigger picture 
orientation for the Chandler email client.

Jonathan



At 02:44 12/21/03, Ted Leung wrote:
>Here's a reference to some stuff being done at Microsoft on
>conversations in e-mail.
>
>http://www.hanselman.com/blog/PermaLink.aspx?guid=de3f5c09-7fa6-4ec6-817f-25901af7db32
>
>I'm not advocating, just reporting the existence of this.
>--
>Ted Leung                 Open Source Applications Foundation (OSAF)
>PGP Fingerprint: 1003 7870 251F FA71 A59A  CEE3 BEBA 2B87 F5FC 4B42
>
>_ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _
>
>Open Source Applications Foundation "Design" mailing list
>http://lists.osafoundation.org/mailman/listinfo/design