Microsoft Technology Licensing, LLC

William Ritter Avery

Jesse Clay Satterfield

Jensen Michael Harris

Martijn Eldert Van Tilburg

Bruce D Wiedemann

Jonathan Jay Cadiz

Kevin Lane Brown

Jason C Mayans

Todd J Abel

Jin Ma

Suryanarayana Murty Gorti

Mohammad Mamunur Rashid

Alvin Mok

Erin Woo

Weina Xie

Fernanda Mendes Richnak

Garett Yoshiharu Sakamoto

Omer Atay

Jonathan David Butler

Dan Murillo

Corina Arama

Lingnan Becker

Systems and method are directed to launching an application from a rail located within a user interface of a personal information manager application. More specifically, a display of a first user interface of a first application may be rendered at a display device, where the first user interface includes a rail populated with a plurality of icons representing a plurality of applications. At least one of the plurality of icons may be selected and a second application may be determined based on the selected icon. Based upon the selection of the icon, a display of a second user interface may be rendered within a portion of the first user interface.

Left rail corresponding icon for launching apps within the context of a personal information manager

Automatic sorting and grouping of electronic mail items in an electronic mail system is provided. An automatic mail grouping property may be selected for electronic mail received, sent or stored in a variety of storage folders. For a given mail location (e.g., received mail, sent mail, or a given mail storage folder), a selected automatic grouping property causes mail to be displayed to a user in one or more categories that make location of specific mail items easier and more efficient. Visible dividers with optional headings may be provided between mail categories to quickly draw a user's attention to a given mail category and to separate large numbers of mail into logical groupings that make location of specific mail items more manageable.

Automatic grouping of electronic mail

A data aggregation system is described herein for accessing and viewing information about an entity stored in multiple data stores. The data aggregation system identifies an entry in a primary data store that contains information about an entity. The system receives a request to associate an entry in a secondary data store with the identified entry in the primary data store. Then, the system identifies information in the secondary data store that identifies the entry in the secondary data store and associates the identified information with the entry in the primary data store. When a user requests to view the entry in the primary data store, the system retrieves the information about the entry in the primary data store and uses the stored entry identifier to also retrieve the information about the entry from the secondary data store. Thus, the information remains in the data store in which it originated, but the data aggregation system provides a unified view.

Aggregation of data stored in multiple data stores

Real time availability data (free/busy data) is provided for potential meeting attendees and/or assets. An availability service is queried for availability data for one or more attendees and/or meeting assets. The availability service determines the identity of an electronic mailbox server on which is stored current real time calendaring data for the desired attendees and/or assets. The requested data is retrieved by the availability service from one or more mailbox servers having data for each attendee and/or asset. Potential attendees may set permissions on their respective availability data to restrict the amount and types of data that may be retrieved by a given data requester. Data queries and data responses may be structured according to the Extensible Markup Language (XML) and application programming interfaces (API) may be exposed for allowing requesting applications to efficiently call the availability service for availability data.

Availability data service

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Redmond, WA, United States of America

William Ritter Avery