Multiple chats sessions with same contact in S4B window ?

Hi, Braedon:

 

Thanks for keeping track of us.  I understand your skepticism.  Our target is to release a fix for this to the Insider builds in February.  

 

The reason why this was delayed earlier in the year was that there is a fundamental disconnect between how IM messages are stored -- as separate conversations in the Conversation History folder of your Exchange mailbox -- and how we want to display them in the UI -- as if it had been one continuous conversation.  The items in Exchange have overlapping messages, links between conversations in certain cases but not others, and other irregularities.  We have looked in the past at how to change the behavior systemically, across the server and all of our shipping clients, but that is a very deep and complex task.  As you have observed, plans on that front have been delayed and then stopped.

 

Our engineering team is trying to tackle this in a different way.  We have had a lot of feedback internally on their implementation, as various side cases and issues have come to light.  One big concern is the performance of loading a chat window when it involves stitching together various separate and overlapping conversation elements.

 

I totally understand your skepticism, and my goal is to be transparent with you on progress we are making.  Building software is tricky and prone to unexpected delays, I've shared more details about plans on this than we typically do, for this very reason of having implementation take longer that we first thought and disappointing customers.  I know it has been a long wait to fix a very frustrating experience.  Hang in there, I promise we are actively working on this.

 

Phil.

 

Hey Phil, just a heads up, you only have 6 days left to "Surprise me".

As for this 'Complex' feature your team is working on - I'll remind everyone that Microsoft had it figged out when MSN messenger was released in July of 1999.


A quick recap of timelines for those following along at home;

-Thread was started in January 2017
-Initial timeline for the fix was "Summer 2017",
-Pushed to "October 2017"
-Pushed to "End of year 2017",
-Pushed to "Possibly in January 2018"
-Pushed to Q1 2018

Still a problem after all this time. This is really a pain to use.

 

How about the Standard Desktop Skype team take over this problem for the S4B team. They seem to have no problem handling this issue ... 1 to 1 and Group conversations are all nicely organized ... and they can even be continued in the same thread at any time later.

 

... but saying that it's to be expected ... there's an awful lot that works better in the standard desktop app.

I just wonder what kind of user research is done on these products.  Anyone who uses it would encounter the annoyance of having many instances of chats with the same person.  

 

Such functionality was available in AIM.