Desktop agents in group-enabled products

his article presents a series of obxrva-tions about agents , products and mdus-try trends. We see untapped power and nr;lr-term product potential in the simplest agent technologies: l Mail filters and in natural language , and without even being particularly " intelligent. " Through its experience with group-enabling technology, Lotus has recognized the power and broad a~~licabilitv of database agents address important problems, for which there are tractable solutions. l Groupambled applications can leverage those same tractable solutions to extend the applicability of agents to broader classes of group work. We would also like to speculate on next steps that would be most valuable given industry trends. Agents can play important roles in a product suite. A suite is a set of desktop applications that used to operate in isolation, but have been integrated to help reduce the cost of software ownership and improve individual productivity. Agents will also be critical to mobile computing, adding a new richness to user interfaces (UIs). As people change their locations and work environments more frequently , they will expect to enjoy the same level of support from mobile computing, despite the vastly different capacity of the new UI and connectivity model. While some of the suggestions we make for suite and mobile products go beyond the state of the art of current products, they nevertheless depend on innovation that is different from Phil, the visionary Knowledge Navigator [ 11 " friend in the computer. " Advances in user task modeling combined with some rethinking of UI design can solve critical user problems, without speaking mail filtering 'iechnology for group work. The connection lies in the ability of applications to publish information in strut-tured forms, making it possible for agents to act on application-specific information, just as they would act on structured fields of messages. We'll start with some background on group enabling as a basis for arguing that helpful agents can evolve smoothly from current technologies. Even the most successful group-ware implrmcntationa primarily target general group communications of the sort accomplished in email and discussions. However, most of a workgroup's business is already conducted using products that support the individual-spreadsheets, word processing, graphic design. Typically, communication and sharing occur outside the context of those products. The next wave of innovation in work-group computing is the integration of desktop tools with the communications and data-sharing capabilities of groupware systems. The result is products that …