8/18/2010A few months ago, we announced OfficeTalk, an Office Labs concept test designed to gain insights into the value of microblogging in the enterprise context. Because different companies have different cultures, etiquettes and behaviors, we have been testing OfficeTalk within Microsoft and with a handful of customers to help us better understand the ways in which people and organizations realize value from such tools.
Parallel to our learning process, we continued to refine and expand OfficeTalk’s offering, and looked for ways to extend the core experience and make it more targeted to the enterprise context. This resulted in an updated version of OfficeTalk that includes changes to the user interface and some completely new features. We look forward to testing out the value of the changes we made and how these new features affect OfficeTalk usage for our end users.
INSIGHT: COMPANIES AS CONVERSATIONS
There is a growing belief that making internal communications more transparent increases knowledge availability and collective intelligence. A recent internal survey highlighted that 83% of OfficeTalk's regular users find interesting information they wouldn’t have found otherwise.
Additionally, 72% agreed that OfficeTalk helps them find out what others are working on and reach out to ask questions.
We knew from our research that most users thought of OfficeTalk as useful (63%)
77% of OfficeTalk regular users asserted that OfficeTalk connects them with people they don’t know. Moreover, OfficeTalk helps users connect with people outside of their immediate line of communication: remotely- located colleagues (69%), diverse business units (69%), and different levels of organizational hierarchy (60%). This is important for companies that want to create a work atmosphere that is open, encourages broad knowledge sharing, and breaks down departmental silos.
  OfficeTalk helps to connect users
across locations OfficeTalk helps to connect
users regardless of hierarchy
BUILDING ON OUR INSIGHTS
These insights led to the introduction of changes that enable users to share richer content and to consume it more easily. Over the course of the next few months, the OfficeTalk concept test will focus on two primary areas:
1. More data gathering and observations of end users to refine our understanding of what makes microblogging valuable in the corporate environment; and,
2. Further design explorations and development of functionality specifically targeted at knowledge workers.
Social networking is steadily gaining ground within the corporate environment. We hope our own experiment, along with several other related research projects in Office Labs, enables us to better understand social media technologies in the workplace and apply those findings to the next generation of software experiences.
3/17/2010
No one can deny the growth of social networking in our society. The social media bug has bitten almost everyone and, to match this demand, Microsoft has been offering our customers technologies to harness the power of social networking. Bringing the power of social media right to the workplace is the goal of new experiences such as the Outlook Social Connector, the enhanced blog, wiki, profile, and user ratings planned for SharePoint 2010, or partner microblogging capabilities built on our platform, like NewsGator’s Social Sites for SharePoint. But what does the future look like? How do we harness this phenomenon in a way that better informs our product development to benefit our customers’ future needs? Office Labs has been researching social networking and the potential for it to positively impact business productivity for quite some time. The last project we mentioned publicly was TownSquare (elements of which are now in SharePoint 2010). Of course not every experiment works – most of those never make it out of our internal testing. Enter our latest experiment: OfficeTalk. This concept test applies the base capabilities of microblogging to a business environment, enabling employees to post their thoughts, activities, and potentially valuable information to anyone who might be interested. Like any good researcher, we have tested this concept on ourselves first and insights surfaced quickly. In fact, it was one of the most popular internal concept tests to date. Not only was the obvious demonstrated, that people don’t limit microblogging activity to the purely social, but that even an IT managed implementation focused on business productivity can spread quickly across informal networks and create unique collaboration efficiencies and experiences.
It is important to note, like other projects we’ve released from Office Labs, OfficeTalk isn't a product – it’s a research project focused on learning how people might use social networking tools at work and in what ways both people and organizations realize their value. That’s part of our mission at Office Labs, to try new ideas on a small scale to learn about how people embrace them, then extend the concepts based on the data and findings we collect. That’s partly why OfficeTalk today is pretty bare bones – the interesting stuff comes as we learn.
We've learned a lot about what works with social software within Microsoft, but each organization is different, so next we’ll be taking the OfficeTalk concept test, along with other social networking experiments, to a few customers to learn how different businesses and people adopt and use these technologies. Ideally we will learn enough to not only better understand how to apply existing social networking technology at work, but also identify trends and gaps for the next generation of experiences.
If you are interested in our research and might consider having your firm participate in this concept test, let us know. Since this is a research project, only a very small number of pilots will be considered, but we’d still love to hear from you!
UPDATE: The OfficeTalk private pilot is no longer accepting nominations.
2/19/2010
Today the countdown begins…
Alright, that sounds a bit dramatic but nonetheless I am excited. We’ve been working towards some really cool stuff here in Office Labs and today was the first time we showed a glimpse of some of those efforts to an external audience.
About a year ago we released a video dubbed ‘Microsoft 2019’ by the blogosphere. The release of this video represented a start to a conversation… a conversation about technology and people. In developing that work we started with people; we listened hard to their dreams, desires, and sometimes not so subtle demands for how technology might strive to be better. Then, drawing from a portfolio of research projects and software explorations from across Microsoft, we set out to illustrate a plausible (yet aspiring) series of concepts. Ideas for how we might evolve software and technology solutions in the years to come. We’ve continued to build upon this vision and in keeping with our past work, new scenarios, prototypes and videos will emerge.
But… one of the next big things we are working towards is a different beast altogether. It is a special new installation right here at Microsoft headquarters in Redmond, WA.
It is the Envisioning Lab. A place for us to share our vision with our most strategic customers and have a dialogue around what resonates and what doesn’t...
The facility is part of the Microsoft Executive Briefing Center and will provide visitors with a hands-on experience of the technologies and ideas we are working towards.
Here’s a photo that shows a glimpse of the space:
The Lab is now in the final phases of construction, and we’ll open the doors to visiting executives in early April. We think it will be a neat way to share some of the amazing stuff being worked on at Microsoft and more importantly provide a venue to explore farther reaching ideas and get feedback on those concepts earlier in the process. It will be a place that we can experiment, try things out and pull back the covers on where some of the early stage research projects live today.
Stay tuned... more pictures and details to come.
1/19/2010
Hi! I’m Jennifer Michelstein, a Program Manager and casual games enthusiast in Office Labs. My current project is Ribbon Hero, which works on Vista and Windows 7, and in Excel, PowerPoint, and Word 2007 and 2010.
I think that Office has a lot of powerful features that can save users a lot of time and help them do some really cool things. When I meet Office users, I often hear them say things like, “I want to be more productive, but I don’t want to take the time to learn new features.” Then, I’ll watch them do something in 10 steps that could really take just 1 or 2. I love watching people’s reactions when I point out a quicker way of doing things. People often react by saying “Wow! I had no idea I could do that,” and that’s exactly where the Ribbon Hero idea came from.
Games for learning is an increasingly popular field that’s quickly gaining ground. When we started this project, we wondered if there was a place for games in Office. We set out to understand whether elements of game play (things like scoring points, competing with friends, and earning achievements) could motivate people to explore more of the app, learn new features, and ultimately become more productive. Could we do it in a way that fit well into the regular Office workflow, without being too much of a distraction? By playing Ribbon Hero, would people feel like they’d increased their Office skill level?
How does Ribbon Hero work?
There are two ways to earn points. The first is simple – just by using the app. As you start using basic commands, like bold, italic, and underline, you’ll start earning a small number of points. As you use more complex features, like Styles or Style Sets, or combinations of features, you’ll earn even more points. But that’s just the beginning.
There’s a second way to earn points, and that’s by playing challenges. Click on the Ribbon Hero button to see a breakdown of your score (for example, how many points do you earn from Working with Slides versus Getting Artistic?).
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| Ribbon Hero button in PowerPoint |
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Breakdown of Points in PowerPoint |
Ribbon Hero watches what features you do and don’t use, and then it recommends challenges for you to play, to hopefully expose you to new features. The first time you complete a challenge, you’ll earn points. But then we want you to use those same features in the app (on another day) to prove you’ve mastered those features! You can max out a feature by using it twice, on two separate days – and only one of those times can you get points from playing the challenge.
Ribbon Hero + Facebook?
Ribbon Hero is the first Office Labs project to dabble with Facebook integration. From the Ribbon Hero dialog box, you can click the “Connect to Facebook” button. Enter your Facebook credentials, and voila! From the Ribbon Hero dialog, you’ll see a leaderboard showing your friends’ scores. Click on any friend to compare your overall score, and your score per challenge. (Hit the skip button a few times, and pay attention to the big blue circle to see who’s winning that challenge.)
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Connect with Facebook button |
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Who's winning on a challenge
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After you’ve connected with Facebook, Ribbon Hero will also let you compare your score to the average score of all of your friends, the average score of all Ribbon Hero users, and the average score in your primary network. Better catch up and get ahead of the curve!
When you hit various milestones, Ribbon Hero will ask you if you want to publish those milestones to your newsfeed. This happens every 100 points you earn per app, every time you get a perfect score in one of the categories, and when you get a perfect score overall. There is one limitation of the application for Office 2007 users: you can't get a perfect score, because there are new features on Office 2010 where you can earn more points. To get that perfect score, you can try out the Office 2010 beta, which is available as a free download here.
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Sample Facebook post |
Learn More about Ribbon Hero...and give it a try!
You can find videos, a link to the installer, FAQ, and discussion forums here.
Give us feedback!
Visit the Ribbon Hero page, and post feedback in our discussion forums! We’ll be monitoring and responding in the forums listening to what you like, love, or flat out hate.
Follow us on Facebook!
Become a fan of Ribbon Hero on Facebook, to stay in the loop about the project, updates, milestones, and more.
Tell your friends!
The more friends you have playing Ribbon Hero, the more fun it will be to compete.
Enjoy! 11/12/2009
Here in Office Labs we love to partner with whomever we can in order to do our work. One of our favorite organizations to partner with is Microsoft Research.
In case you’ve never worked with an organization like Microsoft Research, it’s like having a whole building full of world class experts who are happy to meet with you and advise you on your projects. No matter what topic you’re working on, you can usually find someone who’s worked on that topic for several years, and sometimes you find people who have worked on your topic for their entire career!
The benefits of our partnership with Microsoft Research come in many forms. Sometimes you can point to a project and show a clear link to the work of someone in Microsoft Research. For example, our Email Prioritizer prototype is directly based on work from Eric Horvitz.
And sometimes when you watch one of our envisioning videos you’ll see a concept that came from an idea in Microsoft Research. For example, check out the two images below.
In addition to getting great ideas from Microsoft Research, we also get a lot of value in meetings with researchers where we can quickly get up to speed in a brand new area that we’re working on. For example, we have a few projects that try to help people find the right information, and when we work on those projects, it’s been incredibly helpful to meet with researchers like Susan Dumais, who’s considered a world class expert in the field of information retrieval.
We have several projects underway right now where we’re working with Microsoft Research, and we hope we’ll be able to share those projects with you in the near future! 11/6/2009
Every year during the month of October Microsoft runs its annual Giving Campaign, where employees worldwide donate to their favourite non-profits. Different teams around the company come up with all sorts of entertaining ways to encourage donations, and I had the pleasure of participating in two of those activities this year:
- the Office Labs Auction, where I was the auctioneer
The Office Labs Auction is an annual tradition and a total blast. People across Office Labs donate items to the auction, and then we all get together one afternoon to bid. As you can see from some of the photos below I “dressed up” and helped keep things moving along. We had snacks and some drinks, everyone had a lot of fun, and we raised $16,195, a whopping $5,150 more than last year!
Me, encouraging one of the developers on the team to bid high!
The items up for bid were an amusing and eclectic mix of goods and services. Here are some examples:
- Homemade baklava (which I’ve eaten in the past and is delicious), donated by one of our Program Managers, sold for $275
- Six months of team desserts, donated by two Program Managers, sold for $775
- Naming rights to two conference rooms, donated by the whole team, sold for $175 each (I won one of them!)
- Five 15-minute neck/back/shoulder massages, donated by our Product Manager, sold for $275
- In-home Windows 7 upgrades, donated by our operations manager, sold to four people for $300 each
- A day at the racetrack, donated by our General Manager, sold for $1,500
My favourite donation came from one of the developers on the team. He offered to stand in for someone at meetings for an entire day. He even said that if you absolutely, positively, had to attend a meeting, he would go in your place dressed like you and would push your agenda using whatever method you prefer (argumentative, consensus building, demanding, etc.) A whole day free of meetings? Awesome! It sold for a steal, at only $150.
It’s always great when we can have fun at work and raise money for our favourite non-profits at the same time. I can’t wait until next October when we do it all again!
Neil 10/19/2009
It’s exciting times here in Office Labs. We’ve been operating for a little over two years now. We’ve worked on almost 30 projects during that time. Many projects don’t get past the design or prototype phase – we do a lot of concept testing and tuning of ideas to find the ones that work. When they get halfway interesting we put some of them on this web site to get your thoughts as well as data about your usage of them, which helps us further tune the projects.
Office 2010 is just around the corner. While nearly all of our projects were started past the point where they could impact Office 2010, we were able to assist in a couple of areas: social computing features in SharePoint and user-generated video upload for Office Online. I am excited for the 2010 release to get out in broad distribution – it has so much new capability for the here and now – we’re all using it here of course. A quick shout-out to the OneNote team: Go OneNote!
Last year we released a “productivity future vision” concept video called “A Glimpse Ahead…”, also popularly known as the 2019 video, although we’re not really that specific on timeframe. The video is based on work being done in labs and research groups across Microsoft and elsewhere, and while it is not an attempt to predict the actual future, it does try to paint a plausible future that could result if the various technologies and software concepts being developed are commercialized. The funny thing about making videos that showcase futuristic concepts is that when released, many people think they are unrealistic. Then as various products appear in the market that are similar to what’s in the video, the video shifts to being insufficiently visionary – i.e. lame. So we need to keep working on the vision pieces and taking the heat from the doubters. We’re already seeing products appear in the market that offer the location-based augmented reality shown in the airport scene in that video. A few weeks ago at PICNIC in Amsterdam I demonstrated a piece of hardware that leads us to think very large, cheap, even transparent displays are coming in the next few years. Onward…
These days at Office Labs we’re hard at work on seven different projects, many of them directly related to scenes from the 2019 video. You may see some of these and others in the near future. I don’t mean to be cryptic but until these are ready for public consumption I don’t want to give any details. But I can’t resist this one: I look forward to going head to head with some of you in our first effort to merge gaming and productivity… 9/3/2009
We have moved all our videos to Microsoft Showcase.
If you are interested in embedding our videos, you can get the embed link from Showcase. Just search for Office Labs to find our videos and then copy and paste the embed link as highlighted in the image below.
Here is what the new player looks like.
Enjoy!
3/29/2009
There has been a lot of buzz around the Microsoft Productivity Future Vision video since it was unveiled by Stephen Elop, President of Microsoft Business Division. Many people have been asking for more information about the scenarios shown in the video, the underlying technologies, and how the video relates to Microsoft’s overall vision and ongoing product development roadmap.
In response to many of these questions, and in an effort to encourage more dialogue around the emerging technology explored in the video, we have created two additional videos. Each is designed to give you a deeper view into the story behind the Productivity Future Vision video and how Microsoft is working toward delivering these kinds of productivity scenarios in the years ahead.
<iframe src="http://www.microsoft.com/video/en/us/player/embed/e74e33cb-282b-4a60-8754-d4c482e671c8" allowtransparency="true" width="430" height="326" scrolling="no" frameborder="0"></iframe><br/><table width="430"><tr><td align="left"><a href="http://www.microsoft.com/video/en/us/details/e74e33cb-282b-4a60-8754-d4c482e671c8?vp_evt=eref&vp_video=Productivity+Future+Vision+Video+Talk+Track">Productivity Future Vision Video Talk Track</a></td><td align="right"><a href="http://content1.catalog.video.msn.com/e2/ft/share7/6127/0/9cb6d3d7-7d55-4852-a6d5-9801df029e04.wmv">Watch as WMV</a></td></tr></table>
First, learn more about the technology in each scene of the Productivity Future Vision Video. Watch as Ian Sands, Director of Envisioning, steps through the video scene by scene and describes in greater depth the story behind the people and technology on display.
<iframe src="http://www.microsoft.com/video/en/us/player/embed/c6ca977d-7397-428e-a83a-912c097b84b0" allowtransparency="true" width="430" height="326" scrolling="no" frameborder="0"></iframe><br/><table width="430"><tr><td align="left"><a href="http://www.microsoft.com/video/en/us/details/c6ca977d-7397-428e-a83a-912c097b84b0?vp_evt=eref&vp_video=Channel+9+Interview+with+Ian+Sands">Channel 9 Interview with Ian Sands</a></td><td align="right"><a href="http://content1.catalog.video.msn.com/e2/ft/share7/0811/0/e6cca93a-4820-487f-90ba-b9408aee3980.wmv">Watch as WMV</a></td></tr></table> In this Channel 9 interview, Ian Sands, Director of Envisioning, discusses the purpose and origins of the video, identifies many of the technologies and trends being explored, and articulates how the video relates to the ongoing research and development at Microsoft. 2/27/2009
Today, Microsoft Business Division President Stephen Elop unveiled Microsoft’s vision for how we re-imagine productivity in our daily lives. In his speech you’ll see Stephen communicate the latest ideas and technical aspirations from across the company. It’s an exciting day as we go public with this vision and we hope you will take a moment to watch the speech.  Over the last year we’ve worked closely with partners, customers and R&D groups across Microsoft. So what will you see? You’ll see technology becoming more invisible, but working harder for you in both your work and personal life. Imagine a future where creating a document with a colleague will be as easy as having a conversation. Making connections with people and your content will be secure and seamless. Relevant insight and information will be delivered proactively and in context to the task at hand.
Mobile devices will be more powerful than desktop computers of today. Technology will connect you with the information you need, when and where you need it, whether it be your local coffee shop, an airport, or a roof top in Hong Kong. Software will be there to make getting things done as efficiently as possible in new ways that are more natural. We are already exploring many of these concepts… check out our envisioning and concept test experiments that begin to explore how we are working to make this future a reality.
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