Microsoft Technology Licensing, LLC

Srinivas Chakravarthula

Colin Ray Anthony

J Craig Hally

Ross Nathaniel Luengen

Song Zou

Gregory Thomas Mattox, Jr

Deana Rae Fuller

Brian Daniel Beck

Stephen David Bader

Ravi Gupta

Steven James Frederickson

Hanna Mclaughlin

Carmen Quan

Nithin Adapa

Jeffrey Scott Petty

Martin A Mcclean

Akshatha Kommalapati

Gabriel S Martinez

Man Hei Julia Wong

Jason P Howard

Cindy Moline

Peter E Hammerqist

Various embodiments discussed herein are directed to improving existing technologies by enabling users to share content items directly from an operating system component, with little to no user interface input requirements at the underlying communications application. For instance, some embodiments receive an indication that a mouse pointer is hovering over an operating system taskbar icon and automatically produce a flyout window so that a user can share a currently opened application page to other users via a selection of a button within the flyout window. Such application page may be shared via a single selection at the flyout window or an additional 'are you sure' or confirmation step. In this way, excessive drilling, navigation, and other user input at the application is reduced and simplified, thereby improving the user experience, content sharing accuracy, and computer resource consumption, among other improvements.

Operating system facilitation of content sharing

Contextual help is provided in an unobtrusive manner. The optimum point in time for displaying a help notification is determined by triggers associated with each help notification. The triggers may take into account various factors, such as the action currently being performed by the user, whether the tip has been presented to the user before, the user's past experience with the feature, and so forth.

Contextual help

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Redmond, WA, United States of America

Srinivas Chakravarthula