Patent Application
20130080914
Contemporary communication systems enable users to have a number of identities over various systems such as enterprise emails, personal emails, social networking exchanges, and comparable ones. Each of these systems may generate contact lists based on automatic processing of exchange information and/or manual input. A structure and content of contact information for distinct communication systems may be different depending on their infrastructure. Thus, a user may have a plurality of contact information for the same contact stored in each communication system they are associated with.
Increasingly, other applications are becoming capable of providing access to multiple communication systems for a user. For example, an electronic mail exchange application may be configured to send and receive emails from a variety of systems for a user managing the user's identities automatically. Because each communication system tends to have its own contact lists, it is a challenge for users to manage multiple contacts while using multiple communication clients. Conflicts arise when a user attempts to communicate with a contact while accessing the contact information from multiple sources. Contact information conflict resolution systems can be black boxes that hide the resolution process from the user. Hidden resolution processes worsen user confidence in contact lists and contact information. Lack of user confidence removes any benefit provided through automating manual processes such as contact management.
This summary is provided to introduce a selection of concepts in a simplified form that are further described below in the Detailed Description. This summary is not intended to exclusively identify key features or essential features of the claimed subject matter, nor is it intended as an aid in determining the scope of the claimed subject matter.
Embodiments are directed to unifying multiple sources of contact data into a single logical view and communicating to a user via a variety of techniques that the unification has occurred. Through granular change tracking and data linkage, the user may be empowered to both understand and correct any system action. Match criteria for contact information may be exposed in individual contact views and in the unified contact view clarifying to the user matching and conflicting contact information.
These and other features and advantages will be apparent from a reading of the following detailed description and a review of the associated drawings. It is to be understood that both the foregoing general description and the following detailed description are explanatory and do not restrict aspects as claimed.
As briefly described above, multiple sources of contact data may be unified into a single logical view and communicated to a user via a variety of techniques that the unification has occurred. Through granular change tracking and data linkage, the user may be empowered to both understand and correct any system action. Match criteria for contact information may be exposed in individual contact views and in the unified contact view clarifying to the user matching and conflicting contact information. The external sources may include a social network application, a professional networking application, an email server, and similar ones.
In the following detailed description, references are made to the accompanying drawings that form a part hereof, and in which are shown by way of illustrations specific embodiments or examples. These aspects may be combined, other aspects may be utilized, and structural changes may be made without departing from the spirit or scope of the present disclosure. The following detailed description is therefore not to be taken in the limiting sense, and the scope of the present invention is defined by the appended claims and their equivalents. While the embodiments will be described in the general context of program modules that execute in conjunction with an application program that runs on an operating system on a personal computer, those skilled in the art will recognize that aspects may also be implemented in combination with other program modules.
Generally, program modules include routines, programs, components, data structures, and other types of structures that perform particular tasks or implement particular abstract data types. Moreover, those skilled in the art will appreciate that embodiments may be practiced with other computer system configurations, including hand-held devices, multiprocessor systems, microprocessor-based or programmable consumer electronics, minicomputers, mainframe computers, and comparable computing devices. Embodiments may also be practiced in distributed computing environments where tasks are performed by remote processing devices that are linked through a communications network. In a distributed computing environment, program modules may be located in both local and remote memory storage devices.
Embodiments may be implemented as a computer-implemented process (method), a computing system, or as an article of manufacture, such as a computer program product or computer readable media. The computer program product may be a computer storage medium readable by a computer system and encoding a computer program that comprises instructions for causing a computer or computing system to perform example process(es). The computer-readable storage medium is a computer-readable memory device. The computer-readable storage medium can for example be implemented via one or more of a volatile computer memory, a non-volatile memory, a hard drive, a flash drive, a floppy disk, or a compact disk, and comparable media.
According to embodiments, a contact may be a consolidated set of data needed to communicate with another user. Contact information may include the user's name, email address(es), telephone number(s), user-id(s), address(es), etc. Contact information may also include dynamic information such as a user's presence information including availability and location. Contact information may be retrieved from external sources to supplement primary contacts. Retrieved contact information may be in conflict with a primary contact (displayed by a communication application) due to a variety of reasons. Retrieved contact information may match the primary contact by having common identifier information such as a user's whole name or partial name, user id, and email address. The matching contact information may have information not found in the primary contact.
Throughout this specification, the term “server” generally refers to a computing device executing one or more software programs typically in a networked environment. However, a server may also be implemented as a virtual server (software programs) executed on one or more computing devices viewed as a server on the network. Similarly, a “client” may refer to a computing device enabling access to a communication system or an application executed on a computing device enabling a user to access a networked system such as a social networking service, an email exchange service, and comparable ones. More detail on these technologies and example operations is provided below.
Referring to
A communication application may facilitate one or more communication modalities for client 140. The application may be a locally installed application or a hosted application accessed through a generic client application such as a browser. The communication application may maintain a contact list with contact information for a plurality of contacts at client 140. As part of contact management services, the communication application may receive contact information from a variety of external sources 110, 112, each of which may be associated their own data service or a combined data service 120. External sources 110, 112 may include, but are not limited to, social network services, professional network services, corporate directories, and similar ones. The communication application may also receive contact information from local sources 130 such as other communication applications installed on client 140.
The communication application may access the data services 120 through an external source connect application programming interface (API) 122. The application may utilize the external source connect API to negotiate with the data services 120 in order to retrieve contact information hosted by the external sources. In retrieving contact information from local sources 130, the communication application may employ local source API 132 in a similar manner to the external source connect API 122.
The communication application 220 may present along with the unified contact information about how each contact is linked (e.g., automatic, linked via suggestions, or manually linked by the user) and track the different types of linking on each contact in a distributed fashion. When a user manually links a contact, the contact, with which the user starts the operation, may be tracked dictating which information is to be selected as primary and reinforce to the user that they manually linked the other contacts to the primary one.
The match criteria for different types of linking may be highlighted in the unified contact (e.g., “automatic linking is by Name, Email address”). Furthermore, match criteria for suggested links (e.g., “same phone number”, “same email”, “same last name” may also be highlighted. According to some embodiments, the match criteria may be presented upon hover allowing the user to discover why a contact was linked without cluttering the user interface.
A system according to embodiments may also provide a scaled scope of attribution (contact level down to field level attribution) to assist a user to decide which information can be trusted and which information cannot be trusted. For example, the source for each suggested contact or field within a contact may be displayed. The unified contact may be presented employing a source independent architecture. Moreover, a summary merged view and component oriented views (just the data from a specific source) may be supported. The support for these different views may enable a user to understand which data sources and which specific data contribute to the unified contact view. The approach may also make it easier to the user to identify which data does not belong to the unified contact, understand which fields are read-only, editable, annotatable, etc.
A system according to some embodiments may automatically create a contact to store user annotations from a read-only contact. User annotations may be persisted in the user's mailbox, for example, and be presented in a primary contact list for an email application. Data from multiple sources may be disambiguated and a user may be presented with information indicating that redundant data is being shown but it is actually from multiple sources.
According to other embodiments, select fields within the contact information may be given weight over others and displayed (or displayed with higher priority). For example, a photo, a name, and a job title of a contact may be displayed in a primary user interface, which may be customized or drilled down by the user. Field level versioning and/or change tracking may be used to distinguish user updates to data versus system updates to data. For example, a phone number that is added by a user may be distinguished from another phone number for the same contact that came from a corporate directory. The unified contact view may also be customized based on a platform. For example, the amount of detailed information on matching criteria, sources, and others listed above may be scaled based on available bandwidth, screen size, processing power, etc. (e.g., wirelessly connected handheld mobile devices vs. desktop devices with wired connection).
The storage and identity linking layer 304 may enable a connection component to store contacts in appropriate location(s) based on the contact data provider (communication applications, hosted services, social networks, etc.) by a storage framework 308, create contacts according to a defined unified schema 310 that is understood by the communication application, and link contacts/identities to a specific person through an identity/linking framework 312. Thus, the identity/linking framework 312 may identify which contacts match existing contact objects and store the links.
The unified contact information may be presented (306) to user in a variety of ways. For example, all contacts, user's personal contacts, or aggregated contacts may be made available depending on an application type or platform used by the user. If a user composes a message, then the person instance shown in the recipient field may reflect that the recipient contact has multiple email addresses and allow the user to choose which email to use.
While the example communication applications, services, and platforms discussed in
The second example user interface 410 presents a suggested link for contact Albert Lin. As mentioned previously, links may be created automatically, through suggestion, or manually by a user. The suggested link in the second user interface 410 may be generated by the system employing a matching algorithm or similar confidence based mechanism. The contact's source, phone number, email address, etc. (412) are displayed allowing the user to determine whether the information is the desired information. To further provide confidence in selecting or rejecting the suggested link, match criteria 418 is presented at the field level in this example (same phone number and email address). The user is also given the opportunity to accept or reject the suggested link.
The automatically created link includes name, photo, and source of the contact information, as well as phone number and email address 504. Matching information is presented at field level granularity such as first name being different (506), phone number being the same (508), and email address being the same (510). This information enables the user to determine if this link is the one to be used for the unified contact. If the user decides not to keep the automatically created link, they are given the option to unlink (512) the presented contact information.
According to embodiments, each contact information source (e.g.: external and local) may have network or service identifier associated with the source. The identifier may be used by the communication application to identify the contact information source to the user.
In an embodiment, the communication application may display a history of unified matching contact information. The application may enable a user to select the contact information to display matching criteria. Matching contact information may be resolved through an automated process. As such, application policy may not allow the user to edit the matching contact information. The match criteria such as source type, identifiers such as name and address may be displayed. Although, the application may not allow the user to edit automatically unified matching contact information, the application may allow such read-only matching contact information to be annotated. The application may store annotation information in a primary contact. An example may be the application providing an annotation component in the linking user interface for the primary contact. Additionally, the annotations may persist through a variety of use scenarios including email applications.
The above discussed linking user interfaces and configurations in
As discussed, match criteria may be exposed in a unified contact view to provide a user with information for confidence in selecting or rejecting available links (suggested or automatically created). Match criteria, match status, and similar information may be presented at contact level or field level.
Client devices 611-613 are used to facilitate communications through a variety of modes between users of the communication application. One or more of the servers 618 may be used to manage contact information as discussed above. Contact information may be stored in one or more data stores (e.g. data store 616), which may be managed by any one of the servers 618 or by database server 614.
Network(s) 610 may comprise any topology of servers, clients, Internet service providers, and communication media. A system according to embodiments may have a static or dynamic topology. Network(s) 610 may include a secure network such as an enterprise network, an unsecure network such as a wireless open network, or the Internet. Network(s) 610 may also coordinate communication over other networks such as PSTN or cellular networks. Network(s) 610 provides communication between the nodes described herein. By way of example, and not limitation, network(s) 610 may include wireless media such as acoustic, RF, infrared and other wireless media.
Many other configurations of computing devices, applications, data sources, and data distribution systems may be employed to expose match criteria for contact information unification. Furthermore, the networked environments discussed in
Communication application 722 may be part of a service that exposes match criteria for contact information unification for a variety of conflict resolutions including automated, suggestive, and manual. Contact tracking module 724 may present a consistent user experience across multiple platforms to increase user confidence in the contact unification process. This basic configuration is illustrated in
Computing device 700 may have additional features or functionality. For example, the computing device 700 may also include additional data storage devices (removable and/or non-removable) such as, for example, magnetic disks, optical disks, or tape. Such additional storage is illustrated in
Computing device 700 may also contain communication connections 716 that allow the device to communicate with other devices 718, such as over a wireless network in a distributed computing environment, a satellite link, a cellular link, and comparable mechanisms. Other devices 718 may include computer device(s) that execute communication applications, other directory or policy servers, and comparable devices. Communication connection(s) 716 is one example of communication media. Communication media can include therein computer readable instructions, data structures, program modules, or other data in a modulated data signal, such as a carrier wave or other transport mechanism, and includes any information delivery media. The term “modulated data signal” means a signal that has one or more of its characteristics set or changed in such a manner as to encode information in the signal. By way of example, and not limitation, communication media includes wired media such as a wired network or direct-wired connection, and wireless media such as acoustic, RF, infrared and other wireless media.
Example embodiments also include methods. These methods can be implemented in any number of ways, including the structures described in this document. One such way is by machine operations, of devices of the type described in this document.
Another optional way is for one or more of the individual operations of the methods to be performed in conjunction with one or more human operators performing some. These human operators need not be collocated with each other, but each can be only with a machine that performs a portion of the program.
Process 800 begins with operation 810, where the communication application may retrieve contact information from multiple sources. The sources may be local sources such as an address book or an external source such as a social network application, an email server, etc. Next, the application may determine similar contacts by matching contact information according to match criteria at operation 820. The match criteria may be similarity of individual or multiple field contents. The criteria may also be a weighted one prioritizing some fields (e.g., name, phone number) over others (e.g., birth date, city). The sources for matched contacts may be identified based on an identifier such that contact information can be tracked across different sources.
The application may generate unified contact information based on automatic creation, suggested linking, or manual linking by a user at operation 830. The application may expose the unified contact information along with the match criteria at operation 840 to provide confidence to the user in selecting or rejecting automatically linked or suggested contacts.
The operations included in process 800 are for illustration purposes. A communication application configured to expose match criteria for contact information unification according to embodiments may be implemented by similar processes with fewer or additional steps, as well as in different order of operations using the principles described herein.
The above specification, examples and data provide a complete description of the manufacture and use of the composition of the embodiments. Although the subject matter has been described in language specific to structural features and/or methodological acts, it is to be understood that the subject matter defined in the appended claims is not necessarily limited to the specific features or acts described above. Rather, the specific features and acts described above are disclosed as example forms of implementing the claims and embodiments.
