Futurecat - Michael Karek

Hotmail is making it easier for you to stay up-to-date and be productive on your phone. Starting today, you can get your email, calendar, and contacts pushed automatically to your phone using Exchange ActiveSync (EAS). EAS keeps everything in sync between your phone and Hotmail, so whatever you do on your phone, like delete an email, add an appointment, or update one of your contacts with a new number, will also be reflected on the web, and vice-versa. If you use an email client on your PC that already syncs with Hotmail, like Outlook with the Outlook Connector or Windows Live Mail, what you do on your phone will show up there as well, delivering a seamless experience for managing your stuff between your PC email client, your browser, and your phone. 

Today, EAS is supported by over 300 million mobile devices worldwide, including some of the most popular Windows, Nokia, and Palm smartphones, as well as the iPhone and iPad. For a full list of supported devices, click here.

Setup details: I encourage you to take a look at the phone-specific setup instructions and known issues at the Windows Live Solution Center page on Active Sync setup.

In the coming months, we will continue to bring out new features and capabilities based on feedback from our users, so please, stay tuned for more.

Dick Craddock
Group Program Manager
Windows Live Hotmail

In part one and part two of this series, I talked about the principles that guided our design for the new Hotmail and showed you how we’re helping you navigate your email and manage your inbox more quickly and easily. Today, in this last part, I wanted to show you a few features that we designed to help you share and collaborate more effectively and have more fun doing it. Let’s jump right in.

Improving the Quick Add experience

If you’ve been using Hotmail for a while, you may have noticed the Quick Add column when you’re writing a message.

Or maybe not. We think this is a great way to add info to your messages, but we found that a lot of people just didn’t discover it. We wanted to get this feature a little more attention and give you better ways to share photos and Office docs. We decided that we should design around the concept of one place to add content to your email, whether that’s a photo album, a home movie, or content from Bing.

Sending photos and Office docs

We also wanted to improve the experience of sharing photos and documents by increasing the number you can share and making the experience a lot more collaborative. To accomplish this, instead of sending these files as regular attachments, we added the ability to share via SkyDrive.

We knew we had a great new way of sharing photos and docs, but we found that people didn’t realize they were sending via SkyDrive rather than using regular attachments. Our design needed to provide a natural and simple way to add content, and it needed to provide a clear entry point for sharing with SkyDrive.

We started with this…

When we spoke with customers about the new approach, it became clear that they didn’t understand our intent. They thought they were simply doing what they’ve always done: attaching files to email. They thought of the documents and photos as literally “attached” to the email. This wasn’t actually the case. Instead, these items were being stored on the customer’s SkyDrive. Having people understand that nuance became our mission.

With that in mind, we tried this…

This approach sort of helped, but it wouldn’t really scale to accommodate all the Quick Add stuff (movies, maps, restaurants, etc.). So we developed the Insert bar:

We didn’t just stop there. We needed to make sure all the language in our design clearly communicated the important concepts. We spent time evaluating a series of language options for the items in the insert bar as well as the menus under each item. We had the approach we had been looking for with Office docs and items from Bing, but the more we talked with customers about these options, the more we realized that people really wanted to know where their files—particularly their photos— would be stored, and who would have access to them.

In essence, privacy and “where the photos live” were the critical concepts that needed to be addressed.

Ultimately, we landed on this…

We found that customers began to understand our intent. They would stop and ask “what does ‘Create album on SkyDrive’ mean?” If they weren’t comfortable with moving forward, they would find the thing that they were most comfortable with: Attachments, with the trusty paper clip.

If customers do use the trusty and familiar Attachments entry point and they upload a bunch of large images, we prompt them to “convert” the attachments to an album on SkyDrive.

Again, we wanted to make sure they understood where the photos would live.

What we ended up with is an intuitive and rich way to share the things you want to without filling up your inbox.

Active Views

Active Views were a bit tricky for us. If you’re not familiar with the feature, it’s essentially the way we make email a richer, more interactive experience. You can preview photos shared with you from a service like Flickr, play videos shared with you from YouTube, or see the status of a package in transit to you without having to go to the shipper’s site. When we first started exploring the concept, every execution we did was perceived by usability test participants as an ad.

In order to wrap our heads around the right way to present this new concept, we conducted concept testing in three countries: France, Brazil, and Japan. Our goal was to help frame the approach to Active Views.

Here’s one of the concepts we showed during that early testing.

At the close of these tests, we were scratching our heads—pretty much everyone who saw the concepts perceived these rich views of content from their email as advertisements. But we wanted users to understand that this was personalized info to make their lives easier—not us trying to sell them something. Overall, we knew that for this feature to be successful, we needed to overcome “ad blindness” and make the experience feel more personalized.

Ultimately, we decided the preview box should just feel like a part of the “normal” read experience. Once we made that decision and validated it through usability testing, we arrived at something more like this:

Through conversations with even more customers, we saw that the little signal “zzzz” and the dark background were in fact too distracting (again, our principles include reducing distractions), so we went to this:

And where we finally landed:

The Journey through the design process – keeping customers in focus

I’ve mentioned our longitudinal study a couple of times in this series of posts. It’s time I told you more about that effort. When going into Windows Live Wave 4, we wanted to make sure we kept our customers in the center of our process. We don’t have a formal “beta” set up for Windows Live, so what we decided to do was use our internal servers as a mini-beta. We recruited customers across the globe (the US, Brazil, Singapore, and Germany) to participate in a longitudinal research program—that means it was long term, not a one-day exercise like most user studies. Our goal was to have real life Hotmail customers give us feedback through every important design decision we were making.

This study was instrumental for our big bets, from which treatment of conversation threading made the most sense, to the “where are the photos” issue, to the most critical and fundamental aspects of reading/sending mail. We like to be part of a living and spirited dialog with our customers, and this study really helped us see what sort of long-term consequences our choices would have.

Thanks for reading

We care a great deal about how our customers use our products and what they’d like them to become. Our goal is to ensure that we make the right decisions. What you’ve seen here is the journey that we travelled for getting ideas, validating decisions, and bringing you change you will like. We hope enjoy using the new Hotmail.

Michael Kopcsak – Senior User Experience Lead, Windows Live

In the first part of this series on the design process for the new Hotmail, I mentioned the very important role that user feedback plays and highlighted the principles we use to make decisions that lead to meaningful, discoverable improvements for our users. Now that the new Hotmail has been released to the whole world, I wanted to provide a closer look at it and share our thoughts on the iterations that went into creating some of the new features.

Helping users clean out the clutter and find important mail quickly

In the new Hotmail, we wanted to make it easy to do email “triage.” That’s what we call the process of managing email – deleting the stuff you don’t want, junking the stuff that slipped through spam filters, and filing away important stuff you want to keep.

A couple of requirements we kept in mind:

• One-click access to find important messages (e.g., "from contacts," “from social networks,” etc.)
• Quick ways for busy people to remove clutter from their inbox

We worked with multiple concepts before defining exactly what we wanted to do. Here are some of the ones we tried out.

Early Concept 1: Making a fun interaction by putting the filters as buttons on top of the message list

In this concept, the big buttons would be the way you would “show” or “hide” email in the various categories. How’d it do? Well, in user testing, people felt it took up too much space and required too much interaction. It was kind of fun to use, but we heard comments like “awkward” and “cumbersome,” which clearly didn’t fit with what we were trying to do.

Early Concept 2: Doing something more expected by putting the filters as links in the message list

In this concept, simple links in the message list would allow one-click filtering. We ended up throwing this concept out because it was virtually impossible to get a multi-filtered view using this model (not super helpful for triage mode). Not only that, but adding these links to each line item in the message list would further reduce the available space for more important stuff like the sender’s name and the message subject. Not good.

Mid-Process Concept 3: Narrowing it down with split dropdowns for the filters

The approach here shows where we were mid-way through our design and research process. “Split dropdowns” are what we call something that has two behaviors—you could click “Contacts” and filter by contacts, or you could click the arrow and see a dropdown menu with other options. To take up less space, the filters were grouped into two categories: “concepts” (e.g. “from contacts”, “from social networks” etc.) and “status” (read, unread, flagged, etc.). However, this design just didn’t allow for one-click access. Back to the drawing board…

Mid-Process Concept 4: Dumping dropdowns and making the filters into simple text links on top of the message list

Another option we explored was just surfacing all of the filters as text links by default. We tested this pretty extensively in usability sessions (as well as in a longitudinal study over several months) and found that since the filter links were aligned right, they were pretty much invisible. That didn’t fit the bill either.

Final: Putting it all together, with the filters as text links (aligned left) on top of the message list

So here is where we landed. We removed the blue link treatment, aligned them left (at the expense of our sorting functionality, which migrated to the less visible far right icon). We also evaluated this in usability testing and found that once folks interacted with the filters, it was clear to them how the filters worked, and over time, they grew to love them. Boom! Goal achieved: an easy way to slice and dice the message list for quickly managing your email.

Hotmail’s navigation and overall UI

One of the harder principles to sort out is the idea that change is bad unless it’s great. To accommodate all the new features we wanted to add, we knew that we had to evolve the overall “wrapper” (that’s what we call the outer edges of the Hotmail interface). But we didn’t want to disorient anyone.

One of the first places we started was the left-hand navigation. We knew that we wanted to make the left-hand navigation in Hotmail work more like the left-hand navigation in Windows Explorer for Windows 7. This goal was hard to achieve, but it made sense to us, in order to make your overall Windows experience feel consistent.

Early concept

Early on, we explored placing the search entry box in the left-hand navigation area. We also made the “cogs” (which open little panels for actions like “manage folders”) visible by default. Given our desire to reduce distractions, we ended up making the cogs visible only when you move your mouse near them. That made them harder to find, but it tidied up the interface. Another decision we made early on was to remove the active email address. This allowed the top of the blue box around “Inbox” to be nicely aligned with the box around the message list.

Final decision

Late in the process, we decided to move search out of the left-hand navigation area since it didn’t really have a lot of space for typing. We relabeled “Contacts” to be “Messenger” since we wanted to make sure folks knew that this wasn’t simply a contact list for sending email – it’s a way to start IM’ing!

Conversation threading (back and forth conversations in email)

As we started working on conversation threading, we paid close attention to how Gmail, Outlook, and of course our sister product, Windows Live Mail, handled the feature. We all agreed that none of those designs were optimal for the Hotmail experience. We knew that we needed a design that would allow users to understand distinct messages in a thread, turn threading on/off easily, and collapse unread messages in an elegant and intuitive manner. We also were conscious of the fact that conversation threading was going to be new to a lot of people. So we wanted something that would be completely clear at a glance.

Early on, we thought about email conservations being more like instant messaging, with speech bubbles:

The trouble with bubbles is that they limit the overall width available to the message, so we tried another approach. To help each box “feel” like an individual message, we put a big ol’ yellow Unread envelope at the top. We also added a “show message history” as a way to build a bridge to the previous messages in the conversation and began exploring where to place reply actions.

The next image shows where we were toward the end of the process, when we were still exploring where to put the reply actions. Here, we moved these actions to the top. We felt it was close, but one of the biggest pieces of feedback folks in our user studies told us was, “Hey, when I have a long message, I have to scroll all the way to the top to respond.” The concerns around customers seeing where each individual message starts and ends were something we had to take care of.

After this, we moved the reply actions to both the command bar and the bottom of each page. To help users reply to individual messages, we also provided an “actions” pull-down menu within each message.

The biggest issues we faced—breaks between messages, the placement of reply actions, and overall layout—required extensive iteration, consideration, and feedback from customers.

Could conversations be the default view for all Hotmail customers?

We asked our longitudinal study participants whether they wanted to use the existing “one line per message in the inbox” approach or group messages by conversations. That is, “Should everyone on Hotmail see messages grouped by conversations by default?” We gathered feedback after 7 days, 45 days, and 90 days, and here’s what we heard them say:

Needless to say, this told us that we probably shouldn’t turn it on for everybody. It was promising at first (72% said “yes”) but over time it slid progressively downwards from 58% to 51% the last time we asked, so we’ve left “conversations” as something each individual user can turn on.

These features took a lot of time to get just right, and they represent a lot of hard work. Needless to say, we’re thrilled with the way they came out, and judging from what we heard before and all the way through our design process, we think you’ll like it too.

I hope you’re enjoying this look at how and why we do what we do here at Hotmail. Part three will be coming soon, with a look at some more of the fun and super useful things we’ve put together for you. Check back soon.

Michael Kopcsak – Senior User Experience Lead, Windows Live

Here at Hotmail, we’ve had quite a busy week! All of our customers are now upgraded. The majority of you got the new Hotmail just this past week, as we completed the rollout to over 350 million people in more than 220 countries around the world. Now, everyone can take advantage of a faster Hotmail experience with great new features like one-click filters, Sweep, Active Views and more.

We hope you like the new Hotmail. We want to hear from you, whether you like it or whether you’re having any issues or problems (or just found things you don’t like). You can leave comments in this blog, use our support forums or click the feedback link right in Hotmail (you can find it in the lower right corner of the page).

We’ve already gotten lots of feedback, and we’ve already made some changes based on the feedback we’ve received – for instance, we no longer sign you into Messenger by default. We’ll continue to go through feedback, and we’ll continue to make improvements and updates. So, keep the comments coming and thanks for using Hotmail.

Mike Schackwitz

Here at Hotmail, we’ve been busy getting our latest release out to our customers – upgrading server clusters, building the new indexes for conversation threading, and making tweaks to our site metrics and deployment software. This deployment was complex, but it has been one of the smoothest in Hotmail history. We know many of you have been anxious to get the new Hotmail for your own accounts ever since we announced the new features, and we appreciate your patience and your feedback.

I’m very happy to report that we are picking up the pace of the rollout. In fact, as of this morning, we have over 100 million customers using the new Hotmail, and we’re upgrading even more users as we speak. We expect to upgrade nearly all of our customers within the next week.

Once the rollout of the new Hotmail is complete, we’ll start preparing for the release of Exchange ActiveSync for Hotmail, which will allow you to sync your email, calendar, and contacts with your mobile phone. That release will happen later this summer – keep watching this blog for details.

We hope you like the new Hotmail. Thanks for all of your feedback and support, and thank you for using Hotmail.

Mike Schackwitz

What we set out to accomplish

Talking to customers gives us great ideas about how to make Hotmail better.

One of the things we hear about the most is inbox overload: folks want to find important emails quickly. Whether it’s an important back-and-forth conversation with friends or a YouTube video that brightened your day, it can be hard to find the messages that matter most. When we set out to design the new Hotmail, our main goal was to solve the problem of too much clutter.

In addition to cleaning up the inbox, customers also told us they want to save time doing email. In response, we designed the email interface to make your message content come alive so that you can enjoy it from right in the email itself. For example, when your sister sends you a link to photos on Flickr, you won’t actually have to go to Flickr. When you buy a package online, you can see where it is from inside your shipping receipt. When you’re collaborating on an Office document, you can do it online without having to install Office. Our goal was to make these features natural and easy to use by putting a lot of careful thought into a clear and uncluttered design that would save you clicks and work without getting in your way.

The design principles we used throughout the process

Our design and research team is made up of people who’ve spent years learning about what our customers care about and how they expect to interact with services on the web. Over time, we’ve developed design principles to make sure we do what’s right. These principles, the Windows User Experience Principles, are intended to make changes feel smooth, not like a sudden “big bang.”

CHANGE IS BAD, UNLESS IT’S GREAT

We realize that change is hard for our customers, so we don’t take it lightly. Any change we undertook needed to have clear purpose and a worthwhile payoff.

Questions we asked:

• Do we fully understand the strengths and weaknesses of the previous experience?
• Have we considered all the drawbacks of the change?
• Will people thank us for making this change?

SOLVE DISTRACTIONS, NOT DISCOVERABILITY

We need to make the hard design choices so that our experience is natural and intuitive at the right moments and trust that people will explore the rest.

Questions we asked:

• What is the experience going to be great at?
• Are we presenting interface elements when they’re relevant?

INCREASE CONFIDENCE BY REDUCING CONCEPTS

It’s easy to get excited about making every possible thing new and get carried away refreshing or rethinking every last detail, but that doesn’t always make for good design.

Questions we asked:

• Are we reducing what’s unnecessary in our design?
• Are we reusing what works and reinventing only when needed?
• How is any new concept justifiably different from what’s already there?

A closer look at some of the big changes

In my next two posts, I’m going to give you a behind-the-scenes peek at how we arrived at particular designs for some of our bigger changes in the new Hotmail. I’ll be showing you ideas and concepts that we debated and discussed with Hotmail customers along the way so you can see the range of options we considered and evaluated with real-life customers.

Michael Kopcsak – Senior User Experience Lead, Windows Live

UPDATE: We’re working hard to get the new Hotmail rolled out to the rest of the world. Read this update post for news on the rollout, and once you have the new Hotmail in your hands, look for parts two and three of our look at the design process.

Over the past few weeks, we’ve announced many new features coming in Windows Live Messenger. By now you’ve probably played with the Beta, and if you haven’t, you can get it now at http://explore.live.com. You can also see how Messenger goes with you wherever you are — on the new Hotmail or even using Messenger for iPhone.

One of the first things you’ll see in each of these experiences is a feed of social updates from your friends, labeled Highlights. On your PC Highlights appears in the expanded window when you are running the new Messenger in full view. Today we want to share the thinking behind the Highlights feed and how we bring together the most interesting view of all of the things that your contacts are up to across the web while keeping clutter away to make sure that you don’t miss any of what your friends are doing… wherever they’re doing it.

What you’ll see in Highlights

We know most people use at least one social network and that many people participate in multiple content sharing sites. And, of course, everyone still get tons of social content like photos and social notifications in email. Our approach with Messenger wasn’t to build yet another social network or sharing site, but rather to connect you to the sites you and your friends already use. Highlights is designed to be the most complete view of what your friends are doing across the web. We do this by bringing together everything your friends are sharing like status on IM, updates on social networks, updates from content sharing sites, email updates from your friends, and documents on SkyDrive. If you haven’t already, you can connect your services to Messenger now at http://profile.live.com/services/.

Now let’s look at a few examples of what these updates look like:

Updates from Social Networks you use

Here’s an update from a Facebook friend. The photos look great in Messenger, and clicking them opens a full-screen slideshow. Of course, you can also see recent comments from Facebook friends, and your comments go back to Facebook, too. You can also connect to MySpace, and LinkedIn is coming soon.

Highlights from social emails like photos and Facebook updates

Today, more than ever, people share a lot of content in email, especially photos. One of the things you’ll see in Highlights is large previews of ordinary photo attachments from your friends. This isn’t limited to emails from other Hotmail users. If you get an email with photos from a friend who uses Gmail or Yahoo! Mail, that will look great in Messenger, too.

Web Activities like YouTube and Flickr

When you or your friends connect services like Flickr and YouTube, you can see each other’s updates in Highlights. The list of services you can connect is available at http://profile.live.com/services/. Here are two examples, a YouTube video and a Flickr photo.

Office Documents on SkyDrive

SkyDrive hosts your Office Documents and is great for easily sharing and collaborating on documents with your friends. You’ll see new and updated documents in Highlights, too.

Richer connections with the people you care most about

Until now we’ve been talking about what goes into Highlights to make the experience complete, and that’s important because it puts people—and not just the services they use—first. Instead of navigating to several websites and having to dig through your email to know what’s happening with your friends, you can just look at one place where people are at the center.

But if all we did was aggregate all this activity, we’d make information overload worse, not better. Instead, we do two more important things: we prioritize updates from the people who matter most to you, and we favor the most interesting things your friends are doing, so things like photos, videos, and the updates people are talking about rise to the top.

Let’s break it down. First and foremost, we optimize for the people who matter most, and we do that with Favorites. It just takes a click to add a Favorite, and once you do, your Favorites get special treatment throughout Messenger — you get quick access to them in the Windows 7 task bar, their presence is shown at the top of your Friends list, and of course, we keep their updates in Highlights longer and show them higher in the feed so you don’t miss what these friends are doing.

Next, we take your friends’ activities and rank them across several factors:

1. How many comments does the update have?
2. What type of update is it?
3. How recent is the update?

Then we take the results and show the updates in Highlights in two columns – one for updates like status messages and links and the other for media like photos and videos. You can see the media column outlined in this picture – this design lets the photos and videos stand out while saving plenty of room for text and links on the left.

If you want to pull back the curtain just a bit more, here’s a diagram of how you can expect your Highlights view to look:

The end result is a Highlights feed that shows you:

• More updates from your Favorites for longer
• Other interesting stuff that your friends are talking about
• Less of what you probably aren’t interested in

Bringing it all together

Thanks for taking the time to explore how Highlights brings together the most interesting updates from all your friends across the web while making sure you don’t miss updates from the people who matter most. Try it out for yourself and let us know what you think – we hope you find us a great companion to the social networking sites like Facebook, MySpace, and (soon) LinkedIn that you’re already using.

Doug Pearce – Lead Program Manager, Windows Live

The Hotmail rollout continues to go along smoothly and we’re right on track with our release plan, having now upgraded nearly 50 million accounts on several different clusters. Of course, we continue to get comments from many of you who are eager to get access to the new Hotmail, and we’re just as eager to get the new version out to everyone.

I’d like to give a bit more detail about why it takes time to do the rollout. In the last post, I explained that we go slowly at first in order to give our engineers an opportunity to study the operational characteristics of the new software in all the different environments. That’s true of every release. But there is another reason why this particular release can only move so fast.

In order to turn on the new features in Hotmail – features like conversation threads, QuickViews, and Filters – we need to build new indexes in the storage system for your email. These new indexes allow Hotmail to instantly show you mail from your contacts, or show you messages that contain photos, or let you organize your email by conversation.

We are currently running software on the site to create the right indexes for all the mail in your Inbox. That software must read from and write to the many, many hard drives where Hotmail data is stored. And, of course, it can’t get in the way of you accessing your inbox or receiving new emails. At the end of the day, we’re constrained by the “laws of physics” for how fast we can read and write thousands and thousands of hard disk drives!

When the indexing process is complete, we’ll be turning on the new Hotmail for all our users. We’ll continue to keep you posted on the progress right here on Inside Windows Live.

Thanks again for your patience and support – we’re getting very close now, and it’s very exciting.

Mike Schackwitz

When you want to get in touch with someone, where do you look? There are lots of places that people store their contact data – the address book for their email account, their Instant Message buddy list, Facebook, LinkedIn, their phone…. When you find that person you want to reach out to, is their information up to date? What about their email address? If they have more than one email address, which do you use? Are they online? Maybe you should send them an SMS or Facebook message.

My oh my, there are lots of ways to keep in touch!

Managing contacts just isn’t something people want to spend their time doing. Well, maybe some people… but I gather most of you would like an address book that is:

• Up to date
• Reflective of all the people you know on all the services you use
• Available on all the devices you use (phone, PC, web)

In this release of Windows Live, we paid special attention to giving you exactly that.

Your one contact list is up to date

Across Windows Live and many Microsoft services, we all share a common address book. This information is stored centrally on our servers and available to a number of Windows Live products like Hotmail and Messenger as well as other Microsoft products like the upcoming Windows Phone, Outlook via the Hotmail Connector, Windows Live Mail, and now any phone that supports the Exchange Active Sync protocol like iPhone, Windows Mobile, and some Android and Nokia devices.

You can access your contact list by visiting http://contacts.live.com (note some of you will not see the new experience until the Hotmail rollout is complete).

Additionally, you have access to all these same contacts on Messenger.

For all your Messenger friends, we also make sure that any of the changes they make to their contact information automatically go into your address book so that your friends’ latest phone numbers, mailing addresses, and other contact info is available to you anywhere.

All your contacts across the services you use

Not all of the people you know are going to be in your address book, though. For example, I know a lot of people on Facebook and LinkedIn, but I don’t have contact info for every one of them available in Windows Live. For this release, we built a set of features that connects Windows Live to the social networks that you use and keeps track of your entire list of contacts. When you connect a service like Facebook, MySpace, and soon LinkedIn to Windows Live, all of your contacts from those services will be available in Windows Live automatically.

This means, for example, that you can easily send a message to a Facebook user directly from Windows Live.

Soon you’ll even be able to send your Facebook friends an instant message from the Messenger program and on the web.

In planning this work, one problem we immediately recognized was that a lot of you have multiple connections with some of your contacts on Windows Live. For example, I have my wife on Messenger, Facebook, and LinkedIn. What I don’t want to see are three copies of my wife’s contact information in my address book.

To solve this problem, we automatically identify and recognize who all these same people are across different networks and build a virtual Person view of their data. We combine all the information we have about that person into a single view and make it really easy to communicate with them on the different networks they belong to.

Additionally, we keep this information fresh by continuing to sync data from your networks into Windows Live, ensuring that when information changes, you’ll always have the latest info. Finally, we let you annotate any contact data that comes in from a social network with your own information. For example, if you want to get a birthday reminder for a Facebook friend’s birthday but they haven’t included that information in their Facebook profile, you can add it in Windows Live, and we’ll remind you of their birthday.

Your contacts on the go

Many of us now carry a smartphone like the iPhone, a Nokia device, or a Windows Mobile phone (and hopefully soon, Windows Phones). All these devices can soon synchronize your email, calendar, and contacts with Windows Live so that you can take all your contacts on the go and access people’s phone numbers and email addresses (requires the new version of Hotmail). Combined with a smart address book, you never have to worry about having stale information for your contacts.

As I mentioned earlier, you can also get your contacts as well as mail and calendar in Outlook via the Outlook Hotmail Connector. This will get even better today since we are announcing a new plug-in for Outlook that will let you also see social updates from your Messenger friends (and your friends on other services connected to Windows Live) right in your Outlook inbox.

If you don’t have Outlook, you can use our free Windows Live Mail program for Windows to get contacts, mail, and calendar on your desktop.

Importing your contacts from numerous services

Windows Live lets you import or invite your contacts from numerous services. It’s our desire and hope that if you want to move your contacts to our service, it’s easy to do that. We support a number of popular services in different markets.

All the people you know, in one place

We worked hard on this release to make sure you had one easy place to view and communicate with all your contacts on all your devices. We hope you find these features useful and look forward to your feedback.

Omar Shahine
Principal Lead Program Manager, Windows Live

As Piero mentioned in his blog post, we had two main goals when building the newest version of Windows Live: making everyday tasks simpler, and connecting Windows 7 to the cloud. In the new Windows Live Mail beta, we did a lot of work to make these goals a reality, and today I’d like to give you a quick tour of some of the high points.

Making it easy to share photos via the cloud

Given all of the talk about sharing on the web, you might be surprised to hear that fully half of all content sharing is done through email. Attaching photos to an email message is convenient, but it actually isn’t a great way to share because of limits on the number and size of email attachments. A lot of people try to deal with these limits by shrinking photos before mailing them out, or sending them in small, separate batches instead of all at the same time, but these are compromises that you shouldn’t have to make.

The new Windows Live Mail gives you a better option. Now, by simply dragging your photos into a message that you’re composing, you can create beautiful photo email messages like these:

There are a bunch of different album styles to choose from, so you can show your photos in a way that best reflects your style and personality.

But the Windows Live Mail beta doesn’t just give you beautiful albums; now, limits on photo size and attachments are yesterday’s news. When you send photos, a SkyDrive album is automatically created for you, and your photos are uploaded to the cloud. The people who receive your mail will then see the photos in the email, of course, but they’ll also see them in Messenger, in the social highlights feed:

…and in Hotmail:

…and of course, when they click the images in any of these places, they can view your SkyDrive album from any computer or mobile phone that has Internet access. Your albums are privacy-protected, so only your friends who receive your mail can see your photos. All of this happens without any extra effort on your part – just drag your photos into your email, and Windows Live Mail takes care of the rest.

Windows Live Mail makes it simple to organize your mailbox

We also made big changes to make it quicker and more efficient to read your mail. The most obvious change is sitting at the top of the window. To make it quicker and easier to perform your everyday tasks, we identified the most frequently used commands, and put them front and center in the ribbon:

Next, we turned our attention to the inbox itself. Those of you who get a lot of email know it can be confusing to follow email conversations that extend over several days. In the traditional, sorted-by-date view of the inbox, it’s tough to quickly find and skim any but the most recent replies in an email conversation. In Windows Live Mail’s new conversation view, related messages are grouped together, which allows you to see all of the replies on a subject in one place:

I find that this makes reading and responding to my email much quicker and easier, but since some of you prefer the traditional inbox view, we made it easy to turn the conversation view on or off using the ribbon:

Simplifying your schedule too

Last but not least on our tour of the new Windows Live Mail: the calendar. I live my life by my calendar – if something’s not in there, it’s not happening, or at least I’m not going to be there. Our user data shows that this is true for a lot of you as well: 25% of Windows Live Mail users use the calendar to schedule events.

To help those of you who are addicted to your calendar, we added a calendar pane to the side of the inbox. The calendar pane shows you upcoming events, and provides a quick way for you to create new events without ever leaving your inbox:

Together, these changes help you to manage your email and calendar more quickly and efficiently, all in one place.

So, that’s the short tour of the new Windows Live Mail beta. We hope you enjoy using it as much as we enjoyed building it!

Stephen Hui
Lead Program Manager, Windows Live Mail