How would you like a virtual ‘girl Friday’/'man Friday' to keep you totally organised at work?

Sound like a dream?

But that's what cutting-edge integrated software is set to deliver, says Tom Gruver, Microsoft CIW group product manager, as the company launches its latest working concepts at its space-age office ‘laboratory’.

According to the company's latest vision, future software will automatically search and harness metadata - identifying information tagged to items like appointments or Word documents - to automatically identify, organise and orchestrate common-sense relationships.

These "pattern recognitions" are then automatically acted on to anticipate the needs of the "information worker" - individuals who use computers to access or distribute information as part of their job, according to the Microsoft vision.

Gruver said: "Content created on the subject, useful search results, relevant contacts, documents from other applications and information connected to whatever you are working on is all proactively provided to you. This includes a lot better visualisation of data - 3D modelling - connected to real live data at the back end.

"From a single-screen view, users can see a calendar and emails, phone calls and instant messages. The application creates a rolling time line of events based on your actions."

Correspondence is organised by priorities set by the company and the personal user. They are also set dynamically based on the user's actions.

With more and more information being offered at workers' fingertips, and more people collaborating across enterprises, more visual space is necessary.

To address this, CIW features several possibilities:

CIW workstations featuring two or three conjoined flat screens that work in conjunction with one another. One example is the StraTech, a curved, sprawling glass monitor split into three parts by two bevelled seams.

DigiDesk - a draftsman-style podium that is layered with one giant touch screen, in addition to having a large, upright monitor.

RoundTable, which enables 360-degree views for multiple venues to participate in videoconferencing. CIW first experimented with the system, due in 2007, as RingCam in 2003.

In the past, CIW emphasised use of integration among multiple devices. That experiment continues, as RFID (radio frequency identification) tags are attached to business travel accessories such as PDAs and Tablet PCs.

Microsoft sees Tablet PCs as a possible tool for biometric logins - authentications employing things like fingerprints, retinal scans and handwriting - in place of usernames and passwords. CIW contends that multiple biometrics could automatically apply as a means of controlling information access based on the priority settings attached to the user, as that user moves through multiple servers, platforms and even enterprises.

Located at Microsoft’s headquarters in Redmond, Washington, the CIW features emerging technology innovations that solve real customer problems and gives them a unique opportunity to provide feedback that can directly influence future Microsoft^® products.

“Anyone walking into the CIW will get a powerful experience of Microsoft’s ‘People-Ready’ vision for business: that an organization’s people, when equipped with the right software, are the key to driving business success,” said Jeff Raikes, president of the Microsoft Business Division at Microsoft.

 “The innovative concepts and evolving technologies on display come from throughout Microsoft, but every one is focused on empowering information workers to deliver greater value to their organizations.”

The first tour of the updated CIW, which took place on May 10, showcased the potential for RoundTable and many other emerging software technologies to enrich the office of the future.

The 3,500-square-foot CIW features experimental technologies that Microsoft envisions reaching the market in the next five to seven years. Tours of the facility showcase these technologies in the context of day-to-day business challenges facing employees at a fictional company.

Against this backdrop, the CIW highlights Microsoft’s next-generation information worker tools spanning four key areas:

•       Enhancing individual productivity with technologies that shield users from information fatigue, support rich presence awareness, unify various modes of communication, make information universally available across different applications and devices, and make information easier to find and share

•       Spotting trends in business intelligence through tools that support advanced visualization and modeling of information, smarter integration of metadata, and more sophisticated pattern recognition.

•       Enabling collaboration for better team outcomes with software that makes distributed meetings easy and inexpensive, promotes richer interactions among widely dispersed team members, and streamlines all stages of shared document assembly. This helps enable people, teams and organizations to communicate across locations, networks, applications and devices.

•       Using insights to optimize workflows through software that automatically routes approvals, alerts and exceptions delivers ongoing business intelligence updates automates common tasks to free workers’ time and helps ensure compliance across standards, documentation, reporting and security requirements.

More than 25,000 people have visited the CIW since 2002, and another 10,000 visitors are expected in the coming year. Microsoft will continue to update scenarios in the CIW to reflect new software-based productivity concepts and feedback from customers.

For more information visit http://www.microsoft.com/