[Maarten88]

> Why can't Microsoft make that kind of sharing easier?

What makes you think they haven't done so already? Ever heard of Office 365, OneNote, Lync?

> My guess is that they were too arrogant to make things work for the folks not on the latest versions, or on different OS's.

My guess is that you haven't really looked into Microsoft's products for the past 5 years. I can tell you that they are doing quite well in the product development of their cloud and SaaS offerings lately.

[jzwinck]

Lync doesn't even have an option to pop up notifications when new chats come in. How well do you think that works on a workstation with four screens and no sound?

[kyberias]

Care to elaborate? When I get new messages in a IM window on Lync, and the window is not active, the icon on the taskbar is being blinked.

[jzwinck]

Right. So imagine if you have two or more monitors, and the one with the taskbar is two or three feet away from where your focus is. The little blinking square is hardly noticeable then, especially if you rarely use the taskbar (and how would you if you have four screens, it will give you RSI just mousing over there every time).

There is one semi-cheesy third-party app which adds more obvious notification, but as it stands, email arriving in Outlook is way easier to see than IMs in Lync, even though Outlook knows all about your Lync conversations, including when you are missing one (i.e. it quietly puts the chats you are missing into your Missed Conversations, even while it is notifying you with a big popup about incoming emails). In 1999 AOL IM would just pop up the chat window on your screen where you could see it.

[kyberias]

Well, I'm running Windows 8 which repeats the taskbar on all monitors.

[Maarten88]

> Lync doesn't even have an option to pop up notifications when new chats come in.

Install the Metro version of Lync </evil>