Microsoft Technology Licensing, LLC

Brian Meek

David A Nichols

Pavel Curtis

Anne M Archambault

Jeremy B Smith

Douglas K Wyatt

Alexander G Gounares

Anton W Krantz

Christopher Hugh Pratley

Ajitesh Kishore

Hans Christian Andersen

Lewis Charles Levin

Mu Han

A system (and corresponding method) that employs wiki-type models to consider authoring rather than composition in an application environment is provided. The innovation enables collaborative information and templates to be used to enhance quality, productivity, etc. within a software application environment. These wiki-type models can provide features, functions and benefits related to, but not limited to, general information, auto-fills, formats, schema, conversions, preferences, etc.

User-defined application models

The architecture facilitates the association of resources (e.g., hardware software) with a meeting location such as a conference room or conference space. Additionally, the room and resources can be associated with a realtime conference or meeting at the meeting location. Still further, the resources can be automatically joined to the meeting being held in the room, for both the organizer of the meeting and the remote participants of the meeting. The resources are network addressable and register to a communications infrastructure for online availability. The architecture automatically joins the conference room resources to any conference or call that is being held in the locale (e.g., room) of the conference, and which the user has joined using a realtime conferencing application. The resources distributed across multiple meeting locations can be utilized for a single session, as well.

Automatic utilization of resources in a realtime conference

Callers of an enhanced communication system are enabled to improve their communication experience by receiving context specific call controls on their peripheral device before, during, and/or after a call. A communication application determines context specific commands and configures/reconfigures call controls on the peripheral device. The peripheral device displays the call context specific controls in different stages of operation and forwards user selection(s) to the communication application without a need to understand the commands of perform actions associated with the commands.

Dynamic configuration of call controls for communication peripherals

A conferencing system provides the scheduling of virtual meetings with meeting lobbies so that a meeting presenter can conduct a virtual meeting without the need to send out invitations to attendees. A person that wants to conduct a virtual meeting can schedule with the conferencing system a meeting with a meeting lobby. The meeting lobby has an address, but there is no associated privileged information, such as a meeting password. Would-be meeting attendees use the meeting lobby address to enter the meeting lobby as visitors in the lobby, and request to enter the meeting from the meeting lobby. A meeting presenter can then either grant authorization for a visitor in the meeting lobby to enter the meeting, or deny authorization for a visitor in the meeting lobby to enter the meeting. If a visitor in the meeting lobby is denied authorization to enter the meeting from the meeting lobby, the conferencing system removes the visitor from the meeting lobby.

Meeting lobby for web conferencing

Architecture that allows users in an application sharing environment to separately view portions of data that are not part of the current shared view. An enhanced application sharing component is provided that facilitates rendering the application data multiple times for a correspondingly similar number of simultaneous users, and sending the additional renderings to the other users for interaction. Each user client includes an application sharing viewer that composites the per-user renderings onto the base shared image of the user client to create a per-user view of the shared document. The enhanced sharing component renders the portion of the data that is requested by the remote user as a bitmap and passes the bitmap along with coordinate information to the client rendering program presentation with the shared data view. The coordinate information indicates where on the shared screen of the remote client the bitmap is overlayed to produce a seamless experience.

Per-user application rendering in the presence of application sharing

Architecture for providing communications resources of a network for client intercommunications. A client that desires to communicate makes a request to an arbitrary communications server node by the announcing of identifying information. The web service 'parks' the request until the identifying information is ready. A second client can ultimately interact with the first client by sending identifying information and following the same lookup path to find the location at which the first client request is 'parked'. A continuous hash is employed that enables a client to negotiate services of a resource and via which resource multiple clients can rendezvous for communications. The continuous hash minimizes the disruption to clients already accessing network resources. A resource is brought online or taken offline without dramatically impacting ongoing use of currently operational resources. In the event a hosting resource fails, the clients repeat the lookup process and re-converge on a new server.

Web service for coordinating actions of clients

Architecture that provides real-time opportunistic access to data that is relevant and/or related user activities. Ways are disclosed to use information of a single workspace to structure automatic searches into a number of data stores in order to opportunistically extract relevant information therefrom. An email client can use workspace content to train a filter for identifying new messages deemed relevant or related to the content and topics of the workspace, a system can be provided to use the content of a single web site as contextual data for providing auto-generated links to other sites within the corporate enterprise, a collaborative application can natively understand the content being shared and then look for specific terms in the content which can be employed for generating a search query and returning relevant and/or related data, and combinations thereof are provided for automatically generating and searching data stores for relevant and related information.

Collaborative workspace context information filtering

An approach for providing enhanced application behavior in the presence of application sharing is provided. An application program interface ('API') allows an application being shared in a collaborative environment to be aware of its application sharing status. An application developer can incorporate the API into an application program. Then, when an instance of the application is executing, an application sharing host can use the API to notify the instance of the application whenever the instance of the application is being shared. In addition, the application sharing host can also use the API to provide the instance of the application being shared the identity of a user that is in control of the instance of the application being shared.

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Redmond, WA, United States of America

Brian Meek