Microsoft Office Communicator 2007 introduces a new Conversation History feature that not only allows you to look at past conversations but does way more. Thanks to Conversation History, conversations are now contextual (subjects and past logs are persisted), new scenarios are available and user’s experienced got improved.

Let’s have a closer look at what History gives us.

-          Missed conversations: Whenever you receive an invitation to a conversation and are not at your desk to answer, Communicator saves a missed conversation e-mail via Microsoft Exchange Server. Thanks to Exchange and Communicator, you can leave Communicator running at work, and get missed IMs notifications on your Smartphone, your laptop, or through Microsoft Office Outlook Web Access. Of course, in Communicator, you’ll see the Missed Conversation icon. When it is an invitation to a conference that you missed, the missed-conversation e-mail message in Outlook will contain a button you can click to easily rejoin the conference.

-          Continued conversations:  The Communicator team believes that conversation threads are essential for efficient workflow. Regardless of who restarts a continued conversation, Communicator automatically displays the entire conversation history in the restarted conversation window.

 -          Communicator recognizes many scenarios as continued conversations, such as when you send an instant message and then close the conversation window; when you later receive a reply, Communicator recognizes this continued conversation and re-opens the conversation window. Or, in Outlook, someone can restart a conversation either by clicking the participant’s presence icon or the IM button in the e-mail message. Last but not least, because your Communicator Conversation History is stored on Exchange Server, your conversations are available wherever you are signed in—on your desktop, or later on your laptop.

-          E-mail and IM in harmony: Sometimes you will find it useful to use IM to close an e-mail thread that has been running for too long. With Outlook and Communicator, this is easy; in the e-mail message, click a participant’s presence icon and then click Reply All with Instant Message. The e-mail subject line becomes the subject of the instant message conversation; gone are the days of jumping into a conversation without context. Later, you can forward the Conversation History of this IM conversation as an e-mail, so follow-up is easy too. E-mail to IM to E-mail—switching modes has never been easier.

 -          OneNote joins the party: Communicator and your phone have never been closer; in fact, for some, they are one and the same. Since no phone is ever far from a notepad, we integrated Communicator with Microsoft Office OneNote. If you have OneNote installed on your computer, you can launch it from any conversation; the conversation context will be automatically stamped into the note page, and the notes you take will be linked to the conversation. If you later restart this conversation, click the OneNote button to find your notes, which you can review or update. Similarly, if you open a previous conversation from the Conversation History folder in Outlook, click the OneNote button in the toolbar to open the notes for this conversation.

  -          Find previous conversations with a contact: Communicator is your contact list, so it is only natural that you’d search here for previous conversations that you had with a contact. To do this, right-click a contact and then click Find Previous Conversations

-          Viewing past conversations: Exchange Server and Outlook now include a Conversation History folder where you can log all of your Communicator conversations.  To turn on the Conversation History feature in Communicator, select Save my call logs in the Outlook Conversation History folder and Save my instant message conversations in the Outlook Conversation History folder in the Options dialog box, on the Personal tab.

Marc Boyer

Program Manager