Communication History at WinHec questions

The dev manager on my team did a presentation at WinHec today. The presentation covered some of the work that we are doing around the communications experience in Longhorn.

In the Q&A there were some good questions asked about Communication History that were well answered...

Q: Given the functionality around Communication History, how does this relate to Outlook and Outlook Express?

A: First and foremost, we are providing a platform for communication applications to write to a common store using common schemas. This simplifies the job for ISVs – as they don’t have to all build separate stores, schemas and APIs – they’re built-in in Longhorn. Communication history is the default UX to view logs about a person. And as the data is available to all apps, future versions of Outlook Express, Outlook and other communication apps can expose not only mail messages but voicemails, telephone logs, faxes, IM logs, etc. as well.

Q: How does data in Communication history work with Exchange?

A: Communication history shows data aggregated from multiple sources – data from mail servers sync’ed to WinFS would be one of those sources.

Q: Does Communication history meet archiving requirements for financial services industry?

A: We can’t speculate on whether the default Windows UX will meet the stringent logging requirements of the financial services or military customers. This is a platform and all the right hooks (WinFS APIs) are available for ISVs to build solutions that do logging.