SNARF your e-mail

This sounds very, very useful:

Microsoft Research’s Community Technology presents SNARF, the Social Network and Relationship Finder.

SNARF was built around the notion that social network information that is already available to the computer system can be usefully reflected to the user: a message from a manager might be seen differently than a message from a stranger, for example. SNARF applies this idea to email triage: handling the flow of messages when time is short and mail is long.

The SNARF UI is designed to provide a quick overview of unread mail, organized by its importance. The UI shows a series of different panes with unread mail in them; each pane shows a list of authors of messages. Clicking on a name shows all messages involving that person.

People use a variety of strategies to handle triage; there is no single “best” ordering of email messages to produce an optimal outcome.

SNARF gives the user the freedom to build their own ordering. Each person in their inbox is assigned a set of meta-information: “number of emails sent in the last month,” for example. These metrics can, in turn, be combined to create an ordering across all contacts. For more information, check out the CEAS paper on SNARF.

I don’t believe there’s a “magic bullet” for organizing e-mail, but this concept has a lot of potential for helping to prioritize interesting stuff. I’m especially interested in comparing it with ClearContext.

Office to open XML formats

Well, this is interesting. Microsoft is Standardizing the Microsoft Office Open XML formats. Brian Jones of the Office team says:

We are going to bring the Microsoft Office Open XML formats to a standards body with the intention of eventually making the formats an ISO standard.

This sounds like a pretty definitive response to the Massachusetts-based anti-Microsoft gang.

Office 12 Beta 1 is here

Mary Jo Foley says Ten Thousand Testers Start Downloading Office 12 Beta 1 Bits:

The wait for the first official Office 12 bits is over.

As of 12:01 a.m. EST Thursday, Microsoft will open the floodgates and allow the 10,000 pre-approved technical beta testers to start downloading the Office 12 Beta 1 bits.

I’d add some details of my own, but I’ll have to read my NDA first.

What is Microsoft Office Live?

So I go away for a few days, and while I’m away, Microsoft announces Microsoft Office Live. The first few reports I read last night hinted that this was a hosted version of Microsoft Office, but that’s not what this sounds like at all:

Microsoft Office Live will provide your company with its own domain name, Web site, and e-mail accounts for free.

Additionally, Microsoft Office Live will offer you and your employees expert business management applications, such as customer, project, and document management tools, and a security-enhanced private Web site—affordably managed and maintained by Microsoft—where you can work together and share information with your employees, customers, suppliers, and contractors.

This sounds more like a hosted version of SharePoint, with lots of little extras:

A complete set of tools for managing time, tasks, projects, and company data that integrates with your existing Microsoft Office programs…

If I’m reading this right, it’s essentially an intranet for companies that aren’t big enough to have their own IT staffs.

A beta version is set to launch in early 2006.

Podcast alert

I’ll be a featured guest on Ian Dixon’s Media Center Show this week. And don’t let the title fool you. Although we talk about Media Center, we also talk about Windows Vista and Office 12, so there should be something for everyone. We recorded it a couple weeks ago, and my short-term memory isn’t what it used to be, so it should be just as much of a surprise to me as it is to you.

You can listen to the show here. I did make one small mistake: I started Ed Bott’s Windows Expertise in December 2002, not 2003.

Protect your privacy with Word documents

I’m hunkered down working on an updated version of Special Edition Using Office 2003 (this edition will be aimed specifically at people using the Student-Teacher Edition).

In the process of working on one chapter about Word, I ran across the Remove Hidden Data add-in. It’s a must-have for anyone who shares or published Word documents. It’s easy to use and very good at stripping personal and confidential information from Word documents.

Phish with high irony content

Well, two weeks after installing Service Pack 2 for Office 2003, with its new Outlook anti-phishing filter, I finally received the first message that Outlook suspected might be a phishing attempt but didn’t move to the Junk E-mail folder. I didn’t notice the Info bar message at first, but when I clicked on a link in the message, this dialog box appeared.

Outlook 2003 phishing warning

That’s when I looked at the info bar and saw this message.

phish alert

Nice of Microsoft to protect me from those potential evildoers at microsoft.com! Of course, all I had to do was click to add this domain to my safe list.

add domain to safe list

This is the sort of stuff that Microsoft watchers like to point to as evidence that the company is clueless. However, I see this from a different perspective. In this case, at least, Microsoft doesn’t get a free pass. The algorithm might have tripped up, but the user gets to make the decision whether to trust this message or not. That’s the right set of defaults.

Still, the irony is noteworthy.

Office 12 beta coming in November

Microsoft Office VP Steven Sinofsky tells CNET News.com that an Office 12 beta will arrive in November. But don’t expect to get your hands on it unless you’re an invited tester. And do be ready for some of the inevitable glitches, bugs, and instability that go along with beta releases:

When we come out with our beta, it will be our Beta 1. That’s the first of the betas, so it will be in the kind of shape that people normally expect Beta 1 to be in.

By contrast, 2006 should be an interesting year for anyone who wants to experiment with new software. The Beta 2 releases of Windows Vista and Office 12 should be available to anyone who wants to experiment with them, invited or not.

Waiting for Office 12

Not to get all weepy, or anything… But I thought Dwight might want to hear this from the normally ultra-cynical John Walkenbach:

Thinking back on four years of MVP Summits, this has been the best day of all in terms of interesting information. It was Office 12 all day. Unfortunately, I can’t talk about it yet. But I can say that Excel 12 is awesome. It does stuff that I didn’t even think was possible. I never thought I’d be saying that about Excel, but it’s true.

Just curious: When was the last time anyone said that about Quattro Pro?

Metro is not a PDF-killer

Following up on the news that Office 12 will directly output documents in PDF format, Mary Jo Foley writes:

[Office program manager Brian] Jones’ disclosure was somewhat surprising, given Microsoft’s announcement earlier this year of plans to incorporate “Metro,” Microsoft’s PDF/PostScript alternative, into Windows Vista. (Microsoft currently is using the XML Paper Specification (XPS) to refer to many of its Metro components.)

And Microsoft’s Metro announcement was seen by industry watchers just one of a growing number of direct shots by Microsoft at Adobe’s PDF/PhotoShop/Illustrator empire.

This is probably going to be the single biggest misconception you read this week. Only trouble is, it’s based on a fundamental misunderstanding. As I posted last April from the Windows Hardware Engineering Conference:

I also got a chance to look more closely at the “Metro” technology. It looks like there will still be room in the world for PDF files. The real impact is to replace the old Enhanced Metafile (EMF) format with a new, smarter native format for printed output. There’s a big overlap with PDF files, but it’s not as direct a competitor as early reports, including mine, might suggest.

Microsoft did a poor job when they initially talked about the Metro technology, leading lots of people to speculate that it was a PDF-killer. A closer look reveals it’s no such thing, but the original flawed description has already spread far and wide.

Update: Read more technical details on the XML Paper Specification (XPS) here. XPS is first and foremost a container specification for application data. It’s true that the XPS Document format is very PDF-like, but I don’t think anyone has any illusions that it will replace PDFs. If you use Office 12, it probably will allow you to edit XPS Documents in the same way that Acrobat (the full product) allows you to edit PDF files, without having to leave Office or buy a separate program.