When Microsoft first announced the Unified Communications strategy & partnerships last year, one of the pictures that was shown off was of a prototype "Communicator phone" - a networked device which could be used to make phone calls through the Office Communications Server, and would show the presence of the user's list of contacts, as held on OCS and normally manipulated through the Office Communicator client.

I've had a play with one of these prototype devices (courtesy of Mark Deakin) and although it still has the air of an unfinished product, it's a really interesting idea - sign in to the phone and see the presence of all your contacts, or search the AD directly from the phone so you can dial people by name rather than a number.

I saw a slide the other day with a photo of a device that Polycom is building - and came across the same picture on Tom Keating's blog too... it's starting to look very interesting device-wise. Word is, further details will be available soon, so watch this space...

Here's an appeal - nearly 8 years ago, I wrote* a little COM addin for the-then new Outlook 2000, which "compressed threads". The idea was that it could take an email thread (eg a discussion over a period of time and a number of responses, from any number of people, and typically sent to a distribution list for the purposes of discussion), and compress that thread down to the salient points. It has evolved over a few iterations since but has been largely dormant for the best part of 5 years - it does everything I need it to do, so I've never developed it any further (and if truth be told, a hard disk crash blew away the source for the last version and I could never face going back to a previous beta and re-developing the changes I'd made).

I'd like to understand if anyone else would like it.

The basic assumption with Thread Compressor is that when people reply using Outlook, they tend to add all their comments at the top - some do inline replies, but most eschew that - and don't edit the original contents. If this assumption holds true, then it would be possible to compress all discussion threads down to only holding onto the final email or the final post (to a public folder) since it will contain the entire history of that branch of the thread. Of course, there may be multiple branches of the thread, and Thread Compressor handles that.

The first time many people run TC on a large folder, it will routinely get rid of 50% or more of the content, so proves useful in slimming down folders where you archive stuff, or folders where distribution list contents are sent by Outlook rules, never to be read but to be indexed by Windows Desktop Search or similar.

In my last run, I scanned almost 1Gb of email and the Thread Compressor discovered about 21Mb of mail which could be removed... not quite as dramatic as 50%, but it saved me reading over 1,000 emails and it reduced my mailbox size a little...

There are a few obvious benefits to thread compression...

• It reduces the size of your mailbox, so keeps you under-quota
• It removes spurious email so you have less stuff to plough through
• When searching, it reduces the number of hits since it won't return every mail in a thread which contains the same word(s)

... but some obvious potential downsides...

• The assumption at the top of this post. If I reply to someone's email, but change the contents of their original message in the reply, then TC will retain the modified version and it will look like the originator really said that. There may be ways to work around this limitation now, but I never bothered to figure them out.
• Legal compliance - maybe you need to keep a copy of every mail for compliance purposes: if so, users programmatically deleting messages could be a *bad thing*.
• erm, can't think of any/many more...

If you think this kind of functionality should be either built into Outlook or available as an opt-in addon, then please let me know. We have many thousands of regular users of Thread Compressor inside Microsoft. It would be cool to think of millions more outside as well...

//Ewan

* The really smart bit of TC was actually put together by a guy called Peter Lamsdale. All I did was take his algorithm - which I still have difficulty understanding much less explaining - and strap a UI around it. An earlier version of TC was published (unofficially) on a website and an article was written about it by Evan Morris. There is even an unconnected MSDN bit of sample code which is nowhere near as effective (IMHO)

I just read news of an 11-hour outage in RIM's Blackberry infrastructure on ZDNet - ouch. Not only did email stop flowing to the devices during the outage, but the backlog of mail which built up is taking time to clear.

Without wishing to gloat (really), users of Windows Mobile devices for push email wouldn't suffer something like this (with the possible exception of their mobile carrier having a major network outage, which would affect Blackberry users as well and would be unlikely to last so long). Once you've deployed a real mobile mail solution, having any kind of serious outage is a worrying thing - especially if users are giving up laptops in order to rely on their mobile devices...

There are some architectural documents which outline the approach to using Windows Mobile and Exchange - such as the one in the Deployment Guide.

If you're interested in how Direct Push works, you'd do well to check out these posts on the Exchange Team blog too:

• Solving the Phone Synchronization Problem End-to-End
• Direct Push is just a heartbeat away

I've been beta-testing this update for a little while and it seems to make quite a difference to the performance of Outlook 2007 (especially at startup) when you have large PST files, or a large offline cache of a mailbox. The Outlook team released it live, yesterday.

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/933493

I'd highly recommend giving it a go - it's one of those updates where you might not really notice much positive improvement after you've installed it, but you do notice that there are less of the times where you notice there's a performance problem :)

I am feeling under the weather at the moment.

Been off work for a couple of days with what seems to be some kind of chest infection. I finally decided to stop waiting for it to go away on its own, and went to see the doctor - starting by looking at the website of the surgery, since I've moved house in the last year and haven't had a need to register with the new place yet.

Just as a precaution, I went off to NHS Direct to see what was wrong with me - they have a wizard that asks you about the symptoms you might be experiencing, after you give it a steer. So I thought, "Breathing difficulties in Adults", yep... then filled out the next set of answers... 

Now my lips aren't blue (as far as I recall), I can talk OK but now and again do have a bit of a wheeze, so that sounds about right..

YIKES. Anyway, I'm pretty confident I'm not in the midst of a heart attack so I'll ignore that advice for now.

Having a look around my doctor's website, though, it turns out they are now offering appointments which can be made online. Now that seems like a great step in the right direction for busy people. It set me thinking about the time when the UK's Prime Minister, Tony Blair, and his wife & entourage, dropped in to see us in Microsoft UK.

The Blairs visit

This was in the run up to the June 2001 election, and the Labour Party had asked if Tony, Cherie & co could come and see us on the day they launched their business manifesto. Of course, Microsoft said yes, and went ahead arranging an event in our central atrium where we would do a few demos to the PM and Mrs Blair, on some forthcoming technology (Office XP) and some future directions stuff.

I was asked to do one of the demos, and with a colleague concocted a mock-up of a system that might be imlemented some time in the future, but in this case was using a Pocket PC with Wireless LAN (then a PCMCIA card in a Jacket that clipped to the back of a still-shiny Compaq iPaq).

(that's me at the bottom in case you haven't guessed)

The demo was a little app which a health visitor might use if doing a home visit to a couple with a new born baby, notices the baby's a bit off-colour. The app would:

•  issue a prescription of the appropriate medicine
• let the parents chose which pharmacists they'd like to have the prescription details sent to automatically (advising back when the prescription would be ready for collection)
• arranged a date of a follow-up appointment with a doctor at the surgery, based on their availability and the parents' preference of time.

SIx years ago, this might not have looked like rocket science to IT people but could really change the way healthcare is delivered. Now, it looks like a straightforward thing to do technically, what with advances is size and power of mobile devices which would be 3G connected or similar.

I stepped through the wizard on the device, which was being shown on Plasma screens all round the place, and the deal was that I'd give the device to Mr Blair at the end of the wizard, so he could sign the prescription (as the parent, obviously - at this point, the Blairs had a fairly young baby themselves, so that scenario seemed plausible).

The trouble was, in order for the signature to be visible on screen, I had to remember to tap in a specific place (to set the cursor at the right point, actually) and in the nerves of the situation, forgot - so I handed the PM the device, asked him to sign, which he duly did with a flourish... but nothing came up on the screen. He did look a little bemused (and smiling) while handing the device back, but said nothing ... he's either a total pro, or had literally no idea what was going on... I'll leave the judgment to yourselves :) I just mumbled something about the signature being secure etc, and moved on quickly...

Anyway, the visit seemd to go well, and the whole demos were broadcast live on Sky News (where the news presenter said, on coming back to the studio after my piece, that he felt sorry for the PM after receiving "an ear bashing like that"!) There was a little negative commentary from the usual places, but otherwise a day to remember - for me at least, if not for the guests of honour!