Microsoft Technology Licensing, LLC

Chad Erik Fowler

Benjamen Ljudmilov Mateev

Itai Almog

Bernd Ingo Plontsch

Donovan P Lange

Keith Arthur Fournier, Ii

Fan Zhong

Julius Raphael Melchior Schaper

Ryan Levick

Donovan Paul Lange

Keith Arthur Ii Fournier

Efficiency improvements for electronic task managers and an improved user experience are realized when more relevant and fewer irrelevant tasks are presented to users and users are given greater control in manipulating those task items. By heuristically determining times, locations, and semantics associated with task relevance and integrating the management of tasks into more applications, the functionality of the systems providing for electronic task management is improved, as computer resources are spent with greater utility to the users and the user experience is improved for the users.

Efficiency enhancements in task management applications

Presenting and manipulating task items includes creating a task item within a productivity application in association with a content item created with the productivity application and assigning the task item to one or more users. When the task item has been assigned, the task item is displayed to each user when each users opens the productivity application, or when the productivity application is already open to the user. User activity is then monitored in relation to the content item that is associated with the task item such that metadata for the user activity is captured. Based on the captured metadata, the users are alerted to the user activity that has occurred on the content item.

Presenting and manipulating task items

A notes service receives note items produced by various software applications. Each of the note items may comprise metadata, context data, and content representative of a note. The notes service, for each of the note items, stores a given note item in a note repository and updates a graph based at least on the metadata, the context data, and the content for the given note. As the notes service receives queries from the various software applications obtain relevant ones of the note items from the note repository, the service searches the graph for one or more note items relevant to a given query. The one or more notes are retrieved from the repository and provided in reply to the requesting application.

Systems, methods, and software for implementing a notes service

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Chad Erik Fowler