6.UAT Proposal RevisionPrior WorkJames Wnorowski9/21/05Email was one of the first uses of the internet. Indeed, the first email message was sent in 1971, on the ARPAnet. Basic calendar software is nearly as old as computers are, and software with scheduling capability did came fairly soon afterward. Unfortunately, very little has been done thus far to integrate these two concepts.The best compromise we have thus far are software suites known as Personal Information Managers, or PIMs for short. Many of these utilities simply have a email and scheduling software in the same program, but do nothing else to facilitate the creation of a schedule from email information. In this case, they offer little advantage to standalone email and scheduling software.Some of these PIMs, including Microsoft Office and Lotus Notes, are able to create scheduled meetings by sending an email invitation to the desired party. If this invitation is accepted, a confirmation email is sent, and the meeting is added to the person’s calendar software. While undoubtedly an improvement, this implementation is far from perfect. This only works for meetings, which are just a subset of the events that could be added to calendar software. There is no intelligent data mining; the creator of the meeting must go through a special procedure to set up a meeting invitation, and the receiver must confirm the meeting. Finally, all parties involved must use the same PIM suite, as generally one package is not compatible with other packages. This is usually nota concern in a corporation, where IT can roll out a standard PIM for all its employees. However, this is not reasonable for personal use.Perhaps the best email-searching tool currently available is a program called Sbook®5. Written by Simson Garfinkel at MIT, Sbook®5 uses AI to mine email for relevant information and puts it in a virtual business card. While the searching algorithm used in this program is quite good, it does not synch with a scheduling program as far as Ican tell. This reveals Sbook®5’s other significant drawback: at the moment, it only works for the Macintosh operating
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