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Summary: A rich Communications User Experience in Longhorn with a comprehensive platform for building people centric applications.


Articles
* Overview of the Contacts Platformtopiccontacts.asp

A few grafs from the article above:
Benefits of Using Contacts
A primary goal of "Longhorn" is to make it easier for users to communicate and collaborate with other people. To do this, "Longhorn" includes storage features, such as the contact explorer and communication history, and a set of communication and collaboration features. Contacts and all their related information are stored within WinFS objects (WinFS is a very nice approach that Microsoft took to get a general way for persistence of any type of information, be it documents, pictures, media, email, contacts, or other custom types of information).
With these features, users can:
*Share a centralized store containing contacts and messages among communication applications such as e-mail or instant messaging (IM).
*Access contact data and communication commands relevant to a person or group wherever the name is seen in the Windows UI or an application's UI.
*See an aggregated view of all data from across multiple applications relevant to a given contact.
As an application developer, you can:
*Display communication commands and data in the Windows contact places, creating more opportunities for users to launch your application.
*Use the contact explorer and contact controls to replace features formerly found in UI, such as an address book.
*Use the communication history to store messages from your application related to a contact.
*In your application, easily reuse contacts and data from the contact explorer.
*Write a one-way to two-way synchronization tool to push and/or pull data from the contact explorer to your application.


Buzz from WinHec Seattle (May 2004)!

*PC week gushing about Longhorn Communications
*Low key Inquirer blurb
And for the Germans out there:
*ComputerWoche Online