Avi
Program Manager
Office Live Team
As part of our recent update, we released two new features to help you keep tabs on your workspaces – the Activity pane and activity e-mails. As the Program Manager for these features, I’d like to quickly explain their purpose, and provide some tips to enhance your collaboration experience in Office Live Workspace.
Each workspace that you share – or that is shared with you – is more than just a place to store your files. It’s a social experience, a network of editors and reviewers working together on a single set of documents. The Activity pane exposes the underlying social network behind every workspace. By capturing and exposing every event – from sharing invitations to document revisions – it tells the story of what’s happened in the workspace. At a glance, you can easily see who’s been working (or not!), what files have been changed or added to, and what’s being discussed.
As a complement to the Activity pane, we added e-mail notifications to alert you in real time about changes to your workspace. Figuring out when to send notifications was a tricky problem. We wanted to let you know quickly about changes that were made without filling your inbox with excessive or redundant messages or making you wade through a sea of checkboxes and settings.
In the end, we decided the best solution was to simply let you determine exactly how often you receive activity e-mails. When you share or join a workspace, you will receive one activity e-mail for the first change since your last visit. You will not receive another notification until after the next time you visit the workspace. Additionally, in order to limit the number of messages, you can receive a maximum of one e-mail per workspace per 24-hour period.
Want to take a break from workspace notifications? If you don’t view it, you won’t receive any e-mails. Signing in every few hours to view revisions? You won’t receive redundant e-mails. You can also turn off activity e-mails altogether by deselecting the checkbox at the bottom of the activity pane.
Finally, as these features are relatively new, we’d love to hear your feedback! There have already been a few posts on the forums about activity e-mails, so keep them coming. We’d like to know how you’re using them right now and how you’d like to see them improve as we roll out new functionality.
See you on the forums!
Avi