Bringing predictive email to the workplace
Published Apr 01 2014 12:00 AM 27.8K Views

This week at MEC, we’ve been talking a lot about the power of the Office graph, and how it helps us deliver personalized and proactive experiences for email users. As part of that journey, we’re excited to announce an advanced predictive email assistance feature coming to Exchange. This exciting technology leverages big-data and machine-learning capabilities to enable users to create routine emails and responses more efficiently.

Research has shown that most business emails in an organization follow identifiable patterns. In a law office, for example, an attorney may write dozens of routine follow-up emails to similar questions from his clients. Convention requires that every email be created from scratch. Now, Exchange will begin to recognize the type of email he is creating and offer assistance completing it.

The new virtual intelligence engine examines a user’s individual emailing patterns, and uses machine learning to detect when a received message resembles a set of emails that have been previously sent.

To unlock the power of this technology for users, we’ve also created a friendly in-product persona that will appear and offer a pre-written email based on the accumulated learnings from previous emails and information based on ranked keywords from the email chain.

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Developed under the code name “Green”, email network virtual intelligence (ENVI) is a key part of our vision for a smarter, more tailored inbox experience.

Let’s take a closer look at how ENVI works. Back in our attorney’s office, the attorney begins to respond to a client’s question about a specific rule in that state’s building wastewater disposal statutes. ENVI leverages the Office Graph and the Microsoft Clustering algorithm to recognize that the email the attorney is starting meets the parameters of similar emails he has sent in the past. The friendly envelope character appears onscreen and offers a completed email borrowing from prose the attorney has written repeatedly in similar responses. Our attorney quickly and easily accepts ENVI’s draft and hits send, saving him valuable minutes of his day.

Preliminary testing of this feature in our Early Adopter Program has been phenomenally successful. With more than 2000 participants involved, ENVI reports showed an average email auto-generation success rate of 86.357%. This translates to nearly 17 minutes per day (or 6205 minutes per year) for each user.

We will begin rolling out the ENVI update to on-premises Exchange customers this afternoon. Office 365 customers will be able to download the update later this year for $.99 (Canadian version of dollars) per email per user per month. Initially ENVI will only be available in English and Australian with all other languages and Wingdings* being available early next year.

*Wingdings 3 not supported in Texas or space. Happy April 1st

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The Exchange Team

16 Comments
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That Microsoft prioritizes on-premises before 365 is a bigger joke than ENVI...
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In 3 to 5 years from now, we will all look back laughing how an April 1st joke (a good one) became one of the top 5 features of MS Office (or a competitor's product).
Happy April 1st everyone!
:)
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Bringing predictive email to the workplace
Thank you for your post!!!
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It is good that the Exchange Team is dealing with on-premises Exchange customers so promptly! I will have to see what the – Adopter Program Response Is Later. 1st I have non-ENVI Exchange implementations to deal with.
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Hi and Thanks for the ENVI features.
Defiantly ENVI will bring personalized and proactive experiences for Exchange On-Premises customers. Is this going to be on the Exchange Server 2013 CU5?
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Thanks, this is great for Exchange On-Premises Customers.
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Today is the First of April ;)
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LOL!!!!!!!!
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:D April 1st :D
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Giving a new feature to on-prem before 365 customers is a bigger joke than this ENVI thingy...
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I don't know about that persona, maybe a paperclip would be a little friendlier... ;)
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the deployment to on premises made me think something fishy going on:)
are we no.1 priority all of sudden:)
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That gives it away I think. :) I though this feature might come in handy when the product group wants to respond to questions about when the next service pack will be released...
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The joke became obvious when on-premise was favored over 365.
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I hate that this is a joke!
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Not many in the April Fools mood I guess. :)
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