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.
Field
Setting
Server / URL
m.hotmail.com
Username
Enter full email address, for example: someone@example.com
Domain
Leave this blank
SSL
Enable this
Certificate
Accept the SSL certificate when prompted
Mail, Contacts, Calendar, Tasks
All can be enabled (see the Solution Center article for exceptions on some phones)
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 June, we announced that as part of Windows Live Essentials beta, we brought together two programs, Windows Live Sync and the Live Mesh beta, into one: Windows Live Sync beta. We focused on four things with our beta release:
Since the release of the Windows Live Sync beta in June, over 240,000 people have tried Windows Live Sync on hundreds of thousands of devices, and have provided a lot of feedback. The average customer syncs over 675 files with an average file size of 1.8 MB, and uses 240 MB of cloud storage. We received an incredible amount of forum posts and comments as well as informal communication through our feedback site. We have been listening and have made updates based on your feedback.
In our beta release, we brought the best of Windows Live Sync and Live Mesh together. With the addition of remote access and cloud storage, we understand that the new program does more than sync files. So following the beta period, we’ll be using the name Windows Live Mesh going forward, which we feel best reflects our broader goal of allowing you to access your stuff across your devices.
A number of our customers noted the inability to sync hidden files, so we added this support. Another point of feedback was that customers wanted a list of which files were missing in a synced folder. Now when Windows Live Mesh detects missing files, you can easily see the file name and when and where it was last modified.
We continue to see that the primary way customers are syncing files is between their different PCs (or Macs). And we will continue to make it easy to sync virtually unlimited amounts of data between your PCs. When syncing files to the cloud, beta participants get 2 GB of synced cloud storage. Only 2% of these participants are using more than 1.5 GB. However, Live Mesh offers 5 GB, and while only a small number of Live Mesh customers use all their space, we want to ease migration and increase the online storage limit from 2 GB to 5 GB.
A number of customers have asked why we don’t allow you to sync up to 25 GB, given that 25 GB is the SkyDrive limit. While we merged Sync and Live Mesh in this release, we did not merge the online storage system used for Live Mesh with the one used for Office or Photos on SkyDrive. This means that each system has different storage limits and is optimized for different scenarios.
SkyDrive offers enough storage for you to share documents and photos with friends, family, and co-workers. Hotmail offers enough storage for you to store your email, calendar, and contacts. Windows Live Mesh lets you sync all your files and folders across your PCs and devices, and provides enough cloud storage for your most important files. Over time, we’ll be considering ways to do even more to share information across these systems.
We’ve made several performance updates to Windows Live Mesh in response to your requests that will provide noticeable improvements to your experience. We worked on cutting the application load time in half and made syncing large numbers of folders and adding multiple devices to a sync folder faster. We’ve optimized both memory and CPU usage during sync activity as well as decreased CPU consumption by as much as 30% when Windows Live Mesh is idle.
We hope you enjoy these changes and take the time to install the new Windows Live Mesh along with the rest of Windows Live Essentials 2011 once it is released from the beta. In the meantime, please keep using the beta programs and keep the comments coming. Thank you for using Windows Live!
Allison O’Mahony Principal Program Manager Lead, Devices & Roaming
The Office Web Apps have been refreshed on SkyDrive and in Hotmail with several new features, including:
For more details on this update, check out the Office Web Apps updates blog post on the Office developer blog.
Today we’re releasing an update to Windows Live Essentials 2011 beta. One of the main reasons we release betas is to allow early adopters to enjoy our products and provide feedback on their experience. First, we want to say thank you for your help. For Messenger alone, we had over 3 million unique users, 3.5 million updates to display pictures, 6.2 million video calls, and 7.6 million updates to status messages.
Your beta feedback and usage has helped shape the many improvements we’ve made and continue to make across Messenger, Photo Gallery, Movie Maker, Writer, Mail, and Family Safety. Today I’d like to summarize some of the more visible changes you’ll see in today’s update, and we’ll follow up with more details in later posts.
We’re always working to improve the performance and quality of our services and we’ve made significant progress in this area in today’s beta update. This includes things like decreasing the time it takes to start each program or render each webpage, and improving the quality of your experiences. It often takes hundreds of small improvements and optimizations to better the final experience. Here are some of the many improvements you’ll see in this area:
In addition, we’ve been able to improve the quality of the software and have fixed over 75% of reported crashes. We’re not always able to reproduce all of the reported crashes internally, but we do look at this on an ongoing basis.
Many of you have been asking for Facebook chat, and it’s finally here. More than half of all Messenger customers also use Facebook. With the previous beta, you got a rich social view that brought together all your updates (including those from Facebook) and gave you one place to see and comment on them. With the new Facebook chat integration, you now also have one place to chat with all your friends. And if you use Facebook but don’t use Messenger today, you now have an always-on “people app” on your PC that gives you instant access and notifications as people come online in Facebook or Messenger.
From a technical perspective, this is a significant task. We’re connecting Messenger’s ~300 million customers (who are already connected to Yahoo! Messenger and Office Communicator) to Facebook’s ~500 million customers. To make sure this happens smoothly while Windows Live and Facebook both build up the needed back-end infrastructure, we’ll start by releasing this chat capability in the US, UK, France, Brazil, Germany, and Russia today. We’ll continue to expand this offering to additional regions over time.
We know some of you want to connect Facebook to Windows Live, while others prefer to keep things separate. This is a major part of our design and you get to decide when to connect Facebook, and if you do what types of activities you want to allow, including chat. You can change your preferences at any time from your profile page.
One of the benefits of the new ribbon user interface in Windows Live Essentials is the ability it gives you to preview a change before you apply it simply by hovering over the option. With the beta update today, we’ve also added preview capabilities to the “Find” tab in the ribbon. So before you apply a filter (date, rating, people tags), you can hover over one of those filters and see the results instantly.
We’ve also added back date and keyword to the tree on the left hand side. While we know many customers will use the Find ribbon to sort through their pictures, we heard loud and clear that others found the tree more useful.
With the new Snapshot feature in Movie Maker, you can select a single frame from a video as it appears in the preview window and add it to your movie. This allows you to quickly grab an image that you want to keep or perhaps use for your movie’s intro or closing.
In addition, because we know many of you use Flickr for photo sharing and have enjoyed publishing to Flickr right from Photo Gallery, we’ve extended support to Movie Maker, so that you can now publish videos directly from Movie Maker or Photo Gallery to Flickr too.
We hope you’ll download today’s update of the Windows Live Essentials 2011 beta and try out the changes. And today, in addition to English, Spanish, French, Dutch, Portuguese, Japanese, and Simplified Chinese, you can also now get the beta in Russian or German. In this post I covered just a few of the things you’ll notice when you use the new beta update. In subsequent posts we’ll go into more detail on other improvements we’ve made, as well as feedback we’ve received on the new Hotmail.
- Chris Jones
Vice President, Windows Live Engineering
When we kicked off this blog 8 months ago, I talked about how we’d be responding to comments and as part of that gathering feedback from all of you. This blog is clearly an important channel for feedback, but we also gather a lot of other types of feedback, and I wanted to share more about how we bring this together and use all of this feedback to improve our products. This is particularly relevant right now as we just completed the rollout of Hotmail to our entire customer base, and we’re getting a lot of feedback on the beta of Windows Live Essentials (our suite of programs for your Windows PC). Both of these are great opportunities for us to hear from you and make improvements to Windows Live.
We have a responsibility when we design any product or service to be thoughtful about what we are trying to accomplish, the improvements we are making for customers, and the context behind those improvements. This is definitely a complex task as we have to weigh factors like how many customers will benefit, whether customers will get more benefit from one feature or another, the effect of added features on our release schedule, the impact of any change on customers who know how to use the existing products, and all the other tradeoffs that are made in the process of developing products.
We also need to balance competing requests from people who want more and more, against feedback from others who are happy with what we have today. And then there’s the simple fact that we just can’t do everything. Our goal is always going to be to create the best possible set of products and services for customers, but it’s always going to be a complicated equation.
Feedback comes from many places. First, we have the product telemetry that is built into our products, including data about setup failures, product crashes, script errors, and instrumentation that shows which services are being used how often. These provide a quantitative view of how you’re using our products and some of the issues that you’re encountering. Of course, any information we collect is governed by our privacy policy.
We also get a lot of input through the Windows Live Solution Centers (our support and help forums) – this is a mix of quantitative feedback (how many people hit a particular problem) and qualitative feedback (verbatim comments from people in the forums, and conversations with support professionals).
We also track issues reported through social media avenues (including this blog, Messenger, Facebook, and Twitter), and direct feedback from our MVPs and from customer research–focus groups, surveys, informal discussions with customers, and more.
Feedback can span a broad spectrum – from something that is simply not working right, to suggestions on how we have designed specific features; from new things you want us to create, to less tangible things like our branding. We have to bring this all together and determine a balanced response. This means we sometimes need to change our approach as we go along, and figure out how best to communicate that change. And even when we choose to make changes to a product– the change can be immediate, or it could be in a few weeks or months.
In Windows Live, figuring out how best to balance all the feedback we receive is quite important, because often we get contradictory feedback. One person’s “improvement” is another person’s “unnecessary feature.” A good example in the recent Hotmail update is the update itself – we had some customers who wanted the change “right away” and wondered when we would deploy, and others who wanted us “not to change anything.” Managing this conflicting feedback is part of designing software on a large scale. In the end, we try to find the right balance by picking the right features and changes, on the right schedule, with the right communication plan.
As we look at feedback, we find it falls into three general areas:
First, there are times when something that we built isn’t working as you (or we) expect. This could be that our product isn’t living up to what we intended to deliver, or it could simply be a bug or issue that we didn’t catch in our internal testing, or that only became visible when the product was released to the public. In general, these are things that we want to make sure we fix. During a beta, we get a lot of feedback that falls in this category, and many of the issues are new issues which we only uncover through the beta process. These can be things that don’t get discovered until we have millions of people using our products, and that’s one of the important reasons that we release betas. As we make fixes, some of these will get packaged in a refresh to the beta, some will come in the final release, and others get fixed within our back-end infrastructure and don’t require you to download anything new. We measure our response to these reports by changes in the software that address the issues.
The next category of feedback is suggestions for features that are aligned with the goals we’ve set for the product, but, for one reason or another, we chose not to do. These are things we would have liked to do and probably thought about, but we chose to do other features first because we believed most of you would find them to be of higher value. These are often some of the hardest trade-offs to make because we are balancing different perspectives. Something that is critical for one person may be only nice to have for another. The good news is that we intend our value propositions to be enduring and so we will get to a number of these updates in the future. So we will consider these features and suggestions as we plan future updates to our software. We try to avoid promising features in next releases, and instead talk about new features when we have a clear plan to deliver them in our products.
The last category of feedback is for feature requests that conflict with other feature requests, or that don’t fit into the larger goals of our product offering. We look over this type of feedback carefully, and when we know something does not fit into our product scope we do our best to make sure we’re communicating this clearly. While not everyone will agree with our decisions, we do try to be clear about our reasoning, and let you know what to expect.
Hopefully that provides a little more insight into the different types and categories of feedback we receive, how we use it, and how you should expect us to respond. While we cannot respond to every reported issue or suggestion, we do read through all the feedback and will use this blog to summarize what we’ve heard, and summarize any changes we’ve made. In subsequent blog posts we’ll cover some of the recent feedback we’ve been receiving on Hotmail, SkyDrive, Messenger, and the rest of Windows Live Essentials, and how we’re using this feedback to release additional updates to our products.
As always, please continue to send us your thoughts – here on our blog, in other social media and in our support forums. We won’t respond to every suggestion, but we’re definitely listening and bringing this into our discussions on what to build next.