Windows Phone 7.5 "Mango": Top New Business Features
Microsoft's Windows Phone senior product manager details the top eight new enterprise features and enhancements found within the company's recently released Windows Phone 7.5 "Mango" mobile OS.
CIO
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On Tuesday, Microsoft announced that U.S. wireless carriers have started rolling out its latest mobile OS, Windows Phone 7.5 (WP7.5), formerly known as "Mango," to Windows Phone customers. All users can expect to get the new software by the end of October.
I sat down with Microsoft's Paul Bryan, Windows Phone senior director of product management and enterprise experiences, at the company's New England Research & Development center in Cambridge, Mass.--aptly dubbed the "NERD" center. And Bryan shared his opinions on the most valuable new, enterprise-related features and enhancements in the WP7.5.
(Also check out my "Windows Phone 7.5 'Mango': 10 Things You Need to Know" post for more details on Microsoft's new software.)
1) "Elegant" E-Mail Conversation Views
Windows Phone 7.5 features a number of e-mail related enhancements, the most notable of which is what Bryan calls "elegant conversation view," a cool, detailed way of looking at e-mail history. What sets this new e-mail view apart from more traditional e-mail strings, according to Bryan, is that it uses the conversation ID from Exchange to ensure you see the full set of e-mail in a conversation.
"This includes replies from you as well as e-mail in other folders." Bryan says. "E-mail that includes multiple replies shows a vertical bar next to the message. With a single tap of the message, the user interface elegantly expands to show the entire conversation, from which you can select specific replies or the entire conversation and take action such as mark as read, delete or move."
Bryan says this approach is better than traditional "group by subject'" e-mail threads, because such threads often don't show your replies and can miss e-mail messages if the subject line is changed in the reply. The way the UI shows on Windows Phone 7.5--expanding the conversation within the list of e-mails versus taking you to a separate conversation view-- makes for a much more intuitive user experience compared to some other smartphones, he says.
2) Microsoft Office 365 Integration
Windows Phone 7.5 includes "auto-discovery" and "auto-provisioning" support for Office 365 accounts, according to Bryan. WP7.5 users can set up Exchange and SharePoint access quickly and easily by clicking on the Office 365 links in the device's "Office Hub" and entering in their associated usernames and passwords.
WP7.5 is the only smartphone with the SharePoint Mobile client built-in, so users can easily access, edit and synchronize SharePoint documents from Office 365 sites, Bryan says.
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