Capossela says that Microsoft is also making an effort to cut down the volume of email people are getting. "People often collaborate through email. They send each other attachments, which is a very inefficient way to work together on projects. We believe that innovations in the new Office 12 - such as Sharepoint and Groove - will ease the pain dramatically. Groove makes it easy to create team spaces, where people can work on projects."
Groove, of course, is the provider of tools for ad-hoc workgroups, which was recently taken over by Microsoft. Founder Ray Ozzie also happens to be the man behind Lotus Notes. Is Microsoft perhaps moving away from email and conceptually going back to Lotus Notes? Well, yes and no.
"The thing that Lotus Notes did not well at all was to solve inter company problems," Capossela says. "With Notes you could easily build applications within the company, but it was extremely hard to expand that out. We now see that people are moving away from Notes, and start using Groove instead.”
