Microsoft Technology Licensing, LLC

Samuel D Clement

Andrew Keith Glover

Samer Fouad Sawaya

Wei Wei Ada Cho

Thomas Henry Alphin, Iii

Todd San Jule

Paul Deeds

Henri-Charles Machalani

Ananda Sarkar

Naresh Chandrasekaran

Michael Dabrowski

Samer F Sawaya

Iii Thomas H Alphin

Various systems, such as operating systems and application suites, have multiple programs that are installed and settings that are configured in order to put the system in a desired operational state (e.g., a substantially fully functioning state). Different users can have different experiences based on different programs they use, and the set of programs they use can come from network locations. A set of system readiness tasks is created that identifies the various actions to be performed to put the system in the desired operational state. Performance of the set of system readiness tasks is coordinated to display, prior to achieving the desired operational state, a preview of a user interface of the system that is customized to a specific user of the system. Performance of the set of system readiness tasks continues, while displaying the preview of the user interface, until the desired operational state is achieved.

Coordination of system readiness tasks

Matching metadata for sporting events with television program listing data. A global sports format enables the import of sports metadata from various providers. The metadata is interlinked with the television program listing data via configurable match rules or criteria. An enhanced electronic programming guide is created to display, to a user, the interlinked metadata.

Interlinking sports and television program listing metadata

A system and related techniques and data structures present a Web based or other client application or service with a relational node structure to access, store and manipulate XML-based or XML-compliant data. Unlike unmodified XML information for instance stored in document object model (DOM) format, the inventive platform may load a relational node structure encapsulating XML-compliant information in an organized structure having pointers to next peer, parent, child and other links to related or unrelated information. Searching, querying and other operations may therefore be made more efficient since an entire tree structure need not be exhaustively traversed to locate desired data, but instead sorted via those relational linkages. Client applications such as Web browsing, email, contacts managers, calendars and others may therefore operate on XML or XML-compliant data without the loading or performance disadvantages which conventional XML platforms may incur. The data populating the relational node structure may be obtained from XML or structured sources, and for instance be loaded from storage in response to a query generated via the query engine.

System and method for database having relational node structure

Growing community of inventors

Kirkland, WA, United States of America

Samuel D Clement