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the future of Entourage

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I've been working on the next version of Office for quite awhile now. It's long past time that I've opened up a bit about some of the high-impact work that has taken up so much of my time.

Entourage is near and dear to my heart. It is, bar none, the single application that I use the most. Messenger is another app that I use frequently, to have quick conversations with my colleagues around Microsoft. As we looked at what we need to do to help our users communicate better, the answer became clear. Entourage and Messenger already have some integration, allowing me to see your Messenger status when I am viewing an email from you.

So we're taking our integration to the next level. Starting in the next version of Entourage, we're integrating some of the most essential features of Messenger. Specifically, I'm talking about winks and nudges. Directly from Entourage, you'll be able to send a wink or nudge to your Messenger contacts.

We haven't completed our focus group testing yet, so this is really early stuff here. Let me show you what we're thinking about right now. First, we've added a couple of entries to File -> New:

the new wink menu

Now, when you choose Wink from the menu, this is what appears:

sending your wink

Then you just hit send, and voila! You've winked at someone.

We're expecting this to be a major feature in our next release. Focus group testing will give us better feedback about this. For example, is that wink really the right one? How many winks should we build into the app? How do users add their own winks? We want to make sure that we get this integration exactly right, which is why I've been working so hard on it for so long.

Comments

  • Anonymous
    April 01, 2008
    Yay! I needed them badly. LOL! ;-) Good April's Fool. Seriously, I'd like to know if they will be in the Mac version of Messenger 7.0 (animated pop-ups too, etc..., I had saved some of them), and if I will find again my emoticons that I had saved when I used Windows XP and Messenger for Windows long time ago. Thanks and many fishes to you (good luck, lol). In Italy April's Fool is called (one) Fish of April.

  • Anonymous
    April 01, 2008
    I am appalled, but not surprised, that Microsoft would focus exclusively on integration with only Microsoft products. There is a clear need for this sort of integration to include interfaces to popular social networking sites including facebook and myspace. But surely this wink and nudge support should be provided as an OS X service even if it is built on Microsoft technology. In that way, no matter which application is in use, the user would be able to wink, nudge, and poke without the overhead of task context switching. Why doesn't Microsoft hook into the Apple wynkServices framework? :) PS. Wink message formats should be template driven to provide users with the ability to "skin" their Wink.

  • Anonymous
    April 01, 2008
    You know, you got me all excited talking about Entourage. Oh well, if I can't get excited at least I can be amused :)

  • Anonymous
    April 07, 2008
    The comment has been removed

  • Anonymous
    April 08, 2008
    They're not only my least favourite features (sorry!), but my implementation of them was the lamest ever. :)

  • Anonymous
    April 09, 2008
    Gosh... wink and nudge?? what about the rest of the emoticon library??? One reason Entourage has never won me over.