Microsoft Technology Licensing, LLC

Scott Alan Huddleston

Robert William Serr

Mark McClelland

Mark Timothy Madsen

Jason Hendrick Bubolz

Amit Gupta

Santhosh Kumar Misro

Allyson Straka

Technologies are described herein for distinguishing between conference participants associated with different groups. A communication is received from a participant during a conference. The participant's group affiliation is determined and a representation attribute corresponding to the group is used to render the communication within the conference. As a result, the communications from participants of like groups are displayed with like representation attributes to visually distinguish the communications according to group affiliations. An administrator may designate the representation attributes so that all of the communications from participants of the same group are similarly distinguished without action from the participants. Participants may filter the communications as desired according to the groups and corresponding representation attributes.

Distinguishing conference participants

A conference management system is described for administering large numbers of conferences in an organization. The conference management system receives a hierarchical set of categories from a system administrator and configuration settings for each category. When a user requests to create a new conference, the conference management system creates the conference and assigns the new conference to a category. The conference takes on the settings of the category to which it belongs, which eliminates individual configuration of each conference. Administrators can also delegate authority to manage conferences to others in the organization.

Managing unified communications conferences via categories

Groups within an organizational directory are set up as real-time groups enabling subscribers of those groups to receive incoming content via feeds or to interact with the group through real-time chat sessions. Subscribers are enabled to switch between interaction modes, employ different real-time communication modalities for chat sessions, and access stored records of incoming content, discussions, and similar data.

Real-time directory groups

Users are enabled to traverse seamlessly between electronic mail and real time communications such as text messaging, group chats, and similar forms. A context of communications such as a history of the email exchange, attached or related documents, links, trail of exchanged text messages, and comparable information is used to automatically determine addressees for the communication form after the traverse and to provide context information.

Traversing between electronic mail and real time communications

In general, this disclosure describes techniques of controlling communications occurring in a unified communications system. As described herein, a directory is established at a server system that hosts the unified communications system. The directory includes a plurality of hierarchically-organized categories. Each category specifies a set of users. One or more conferences may be associated with each of the categories. All communications occurring in the unified communications system occur within the context of one of the conferences. A user can only communicate within a conference if the conference is associated with the category that specifies a set of users that includes the user. By appropriately structuring the categories in the directory and the sets of users specified by the categories, the techniques of this disclosure may serve to prevent a user from using the unified communications system to communicate with certain other individuals.

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Redmond, WA, United States of America

Scott Alan Huddleston