(Note: Originally published in the Microsoft Watch 5/17/02 issue.)

Bombarded by the sheer volume of e-mail, IMs, phone calls and other external interruptions you face daily? It's only going to get worse.

But never fear: Microsoft Research is actively exploring new ways to help the electronically oppressed.

Microsoft Research (MSR) has devised an e-mail prioritization tool called Priorities -- which became the basis for Microsoft Outlook Mobile Manager -- to help individuals wade through
their mail. Now, the same group is working on a new user interface called The Scope that is designed to help users make sense of myriad email, electronic alerts, calendar entries and other tasks.

MSR has been working on The Scope interface for about a year (Editor's Note: As of 5/02). But the Priorities and other notification-platform technologies that provide The Scope's underpinnings have been in the works for several years.

Microsoft is slated to debut The Scope for the first time publicly at the April 2002 Advanced Visual Interfaces Conference in Trento, Italy. A variation of The Scope is on display at Microsoft's Center for Information Work, a demo of the office of the future, similar to the Microsoft Home center on the Redmond campus.

See The Scope: Screen Shots, White Paper and More

The Scope takes its name from a periscope. With a quick glance, users can see their most important tasks, divided into quadrants, appearing closest to the center of the screen.

"The Scope is a visually creative, user-centric approached to the unified inbox," says Eric Horvitz, senior researcher and group manager in charge of MSR's Adaptive Systems and Interaction Group.

In its labs, Microsoft has been studying patterns of visual attention and visual search, Horvitz says. The Scope is just one of several work-prioritization projects Horvitz's group is investigating.

Another is ongoing sequencing of critical information. Horvitz describes this as a super customized mini PointCast on your screen.

"Imagine if your screen saver could show you all the things that happened -- a kind of 'While You Were Away' type of model," he explains.

While there are no guarantees about how or when an MSR technology will find its way into one or more shipping products, Horvitz and his team are talking with a wide variety of Microsoft product teams, including Office, Exchange Server, SQL Server and MSN.