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The last time I planned a summer trip with a group of friends, it was a long process that involved picking the right dates, finding hotels, and looking for activities to do once we got there. It was all pretty disorganized, with long email threads and multiple copies of documents that people had been sending back and forth in email.
It would have been a lot easier if we’d been using Windows Live Groups to plan that trip. It would have helped us organize all the planning and trip information in one place, making it so much easier for everyone going on the trip to be a part of the planning process.
For each group you create on Windows Live, you get a unique URL and email address. Group members can access all group information from the group's site. Once you invite someone to be a member of your group, they start receiving group email (even if they don't sign up), and they can view group photos and documents.
Each group has its own 25 5GB of online storage on Windows Live SkyDrive, which gives you a central place to store and collaborate on documents. In this release, we’ve added the ability to share documents and photo albums that you’ve stored in your personal SkyDrive with the group.
Correction and clarification, 8/2/10: Each group’s SkyDrive is still 5 GB (as before), but because each member can now also use their 25GB personal SkyDrive to share files with the group, you have lots more space to share photos and documents than before.
Now that Office Web Apps are integrated with SkyDrive, group members can view and edit Word, Excel and PowerPoint documents right in the browser – even if they don’t have Office installed on their PC.
Group owners can "pin" documents and folders to the group profile page to make it easy for anyone in the group to find an important document.
Every group also gets its own OneNote notebook on SkyDrive, with different sections and pages just like a regular notebook. Your group’s online notebook is useful for collecting information from members and for storing centralized resources. You can copy in links, images, maps, and random notes, and rearrange them on the page as you get things organized. It’s great for brainstorming with others as you plan your trip, because you can each add your own notes and ideas to the notebook in real time, without fear of overwriting anyone else’s notes In other words, it’s a great companion to trip planning.
Groups is also integrated into the new Messenger. In one click you can start an IM conversation with the entire group (for groups with less than 40 members).
Group activity is also really easy to keep track of. Each group has its own Messenger social feed on the group's main page.
After your trip, everyone in the group can upload photos to the group's SkyDrive or share albums from their personal SkyDrive folders with the group.
Here we're uploading photos from Windows Live Photo Gallery directly to the group:
And here's what it looks like when you’re viewing those photos in a cool Silverlight slide show on the group’s SkyDrive:
Windows Live Groups is a simple and powerful tool to plan a trip or event or stay connected with your family, your team, or your social club. In our latest release, we’ve added deeper integration with SkyDrive, which makes collaborating on docs or sharing photos easier than ever. Give the updated Windows Live Groups a spin at groups.live.com, and let us know what you think.
Omar Shahine Principal Lead Program Manager, Windows Live
As Doug mentioned in his blog post last week, Messenger is even more social now. The new feed in Messenger makes it easier than ever to stay up to date with the best of what your friends are doing across the web, whether it’s posting photos on Flickr, or updating their Facebook and MySpace profiles. Earlier this week, Mona blogged about how Messenger Companion makes it possible to have a conversation in Internet Explorer. Today, I’m excited to talk about how we’ve designed the new Messenger to allow you to share photos, videos, and content in real time, right within in your conversation window.
The previous version of Messenger let you share local images from your hard drive during an IM conversation. But we understand that you want to share everything with your friends, such as your photo albums on the web, your favorite online videos, and links to interesting sites and content. With the new Messenger, we really looked at how we can make this type of sharing possible when you’re in an IM conversation or a video call.
Most people store photos on SkyDrive, Facebook, Flickr, SmugMug or some combination of them. I use Facebook and SkyDrive. So when I start a conversation with a friend, I get a number of new options beyond just sharing a file or photo from my computer.
New options for sharing your content
When I added Facebook to my Windows Live account, I also added access to my Facebook photo albums, so in addition to my pictures on SkyDrive, I can also share pictures that I’ve posted to Facebook.
Browse your online photos on SkyDrive and Facebook
And what’s great is that the new Messenger provides a higher quality experience for shared content that stands apart in the conversation window. You can see an example below that shows how this works. When I share a photo album with my friend John, Messenger zooms the picture by 5% to fill the entire conversation window. This edge-to-edge look puts the emphasis on my picture, and really makes it shine.
Messenger with edge-to-edge photo displayed
You can even download an entire photo album and share it all at once. Messenger takes care of downloading it, resizing it, and sharing it behind the scenes to quickly add the photos to your conversation. And your friend can always access the original photos, in case they want to save the high resolution images.
When you or your friend hovers over an image in the conversation window, you’ll see a thumbnail strip of all of the images and videos that have been added during the conversation. As in the previous version of Messenger, both you and your friend have control and can switch the view for the other person simply by selecting a photo from the thumbnail strip. Based on our customer research, synchronous photo-viewing is important to maintaining context during an IM conversation. In order to enhance that experience, we’ve added the ability for photo captions to download with the image. And just for fun, we also decorate the sharing experience with a glowing color background that matches the dominant color in the photo.
These improvement are pretty exciting when you compare how images are displayed in the previous version of Messenger with the new Messenger beta.
We went from this:
To this!
People share a lot of links to video sharing sites like YouTube and Vimeo in IM conversations. So it’s pretty useful that in the new Messenger, you can now share videos without leaving the IM conversation. Simply by pasting in a link to a web video, Messenger will recognize it and present the video for inline playback. By clicking View together, both parties are able to watch the video at their own download speed and at their convenience. The video sharing sites that we currently parse links for include many of the popular sites like YouTube, Vimeo, DailyMotion, Break.com, and Wat.tv.
One of the features that resonated extremely well with people is the contextual linking that we’ve added into IM conversations. The way this works is that Messenger has a lexicon of words that it recognizes in many of the markets and languages where Messenger is available. When a term is recognized, it is given a green dashed underline. By clicking the underlined word, we pass the word to Bing which finds links to websites, photos, and videos that you can add to your conversation on the fly.
Messenger recognizes famous people, places, and brands
Bing helps you find relevant photos and videos
Sharing photos and videos directly in Messenger
Some of the words that Messenger and Bing recognize include:
There are two ways you might use this feature. One is simply as a way to add more visual content to your IM conversations. The other way is more of a research feature. By having Bing available to you during your conversations, you can add any content that is indexed and searchable by Bing, making your conversation even richer.
Let’s say you’re having an IM conversation and want to share a video on French cooking with your friend. On the IM toolbar, click Share and then select Video from Bing. Enter your search term in the Bing search box and click the magnifying glass. Bing will return the same results you would get by going to the website.
See what the Bing Community Search Blog is saying about it.
Of course, the ultimate representation of an actual conversation is to see and hear the person on the other end. People who use Messenger are addicted to voice and video—they use this feature 230 million times a month, for everything from socializing to staying in touch with relatives and friends abroad. Over the years, we’ve seen a switch away from a simple voice channel towards full-blown video IM. Today, 81% of the voice calls initiated in Messenger also include video.
In the new Messenger, we overhauled our video chat experience to make it more intuitive, prettier, and to improve the overall quality of the audio and video.
In voice and video we care about providing a high quality, high performing experience for customers. To that end, we pay close attention to things we can measure like call connection time, image quality, frame rate, and call completion and have made dramatic improvements to each of these.
Before the beta, we knew that a small percentage of calls were failing, but we didn’t have deep enough data to tell us why or on what combination of equipment. Video calling involves a lot of variables including CPU, web camera equipment, drivers, and fluctuating network conditions. We decided we wanted to more deeply understand the reason for certain call quality issues, quickly isolate where the problems are, and escalate bug fixes from the appropriate team responsible. So we added a ton of new telemetry to Messenger beta and have been monitoring the incoming data carefully.
We learned from the beta that we could improve video rendering performance if we moved RGB conversion to the video graphics card and save on CPU cycles. By moving the video call to run on the graphics cards available on most machines these days, we were able to see drop CPU usage by 30-50%. And by testing on various hardware and software combinations we were able to refine our implementation.
In addition to adding telemetry, and doing work to improve performance on lower range PCs, we added in-call guidance that addresses some of the common issues you run into while starting or participating in a video call. For example, if low call quality is suspected or audio problems are occurring, small alerts will pop up in the lower right of the window advising you what action to take to address the issues.
The interface for video has been completely revamped in the Messenger. You might recall in earlier versions of Messenger, video calls were displayed inside the user tiles within the conversation window. This felt crammed and unnatural, so we focused on making sure that when you’re in a video call, the video itself is the star of the show.
The interface for video has been completely revamped in Messenger beta. You might recall in earlier versions of Messenger, video calls were displayed inside large chromes within the conversation window like this:
As you can see, video is now edge-to-edge so that you can see more of your friend, with no distractions. But of course you can still access all the rich sharing options and quickly add photos, web videos, and links to your video call:
Other improvements worth mentioning include better animations and transitions in and out of a video call, being smarter about detecting what webcam you have installed, and making sure that when you are ready to have a call, all of the required software and drivers are up and running.
Lastly, we know that our decision to remove the old webcam feature has been painful for some users, and we really do hate to remove features that we know you care about. But even though the old webcam feature has been removed, it’s still absolutely possible to do one-way webcam calls, and we’re working on providing you with increased call control during video chat. The command has been simplified to just Start video call. But if you have a webcam and your friend does not, they will be able to see you and hear you, and you’ll be able hear them if they have a microphone. If you do not want to hear your friend, or do not want to share your audio, you can simply toggle the microphone icon next to your picture or the speaker icon next to your friend’s picture.
I hope you get a chance to test out these new features in Messenger. We think they add a lot of fun and entertainment to the IM experience, and we look forward to hearing what you think.
Steven Abrahams Lead PM, Windows Live Messenger
PS: And don’t forget that as previously announced, you’ll soon be able to have video chats with all your friends using Xbox Kinect – straight for your PC to their living room.
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
In this release of Windows Live, you can now see your friends’ activity in all the social networks you use. Last week, for example, Douglas Pearce blogged about what this means for the new Messenger. He discussed how Messenger Highlights is designed to be the most complete view of what your friends are doing across the web. Messenger Companion is an exciting extension of that effort. Messenger Companion is a browser plugin which lets you quickly share and discover what your friends have shared online. It lets you view the links your friends are sharing, comment on them, and even share something fun you’ve come across. And if you’ve connected your social networks to Windows Live, Messenger Companion works across all of them.
We want to make it easy for you to discover what your friends are sharing online, so if you have your Windows Live ID connected to your social networks, it doesn’t matter where a friend shares information. When you visit a website, Messenger Companion will let you know if your friends have shared any new links on that site by subtly flashing in the top right corner of your browser window. Here’s how it works. Let’s say one of your friends shares a link on YouTube (this share could have happened on any social network connected to Messenger, such as Facebook, MySpace or LinkedIn). When you go to youtube.com, you’ll see a notification from Messenger Companion that lets you know what your friends have shared on the site since the last time you were on YouTube.
If you want to check out all the recent links shared on a site, all you need to do is use the Messenger Companion button in Internet Explorer.
This will open up Messenger Companion and show you all the links recently shared by your friends in any of your connected social networks.
Shared links can spark an interesting conversation where friends join in to comment and give their two cents. Messenger Companion shows you the conversation about a shared link, while letting you view the link and comment back.
We don’t want you to worry about where the activity is happening, so sharing is seamlessly integrated into your Windows Live experience. When you join in a conversation, your comment gets posted back to the social network your friend used to share the link. You can see how this works in the two screenshots below. First, you’re on youtube.com and you comment on your friend’s link in Messenger Companion.
When you finish typing your comment and click Add, your comment publishes to Facebook because that’s the social network your friend used to share the link.
The story wouldn’t be complete if there was no way for you to share interesting things you come across online. Not only can you use Messenger Companion to share with your friends, but Messenger Companion provides one-click sharing!
When you a share a link through Messenger Companion, it will update your status in Messenger, and all your friends in Messenger will get an update from you about the link you shared.
If you’ve connected your social networks to Windows Live, this shared link will also get posted to your profile on your social networks, so that friends on those networks can also see your link and comment back.
Messenger Companion is available to anyone using Internet Explorer 7 or Internet Explorer 8. You can get it now by installing the Windows Live Essentials beta. We hope you enjoy sharing with your friends using Messenger Companion. We would love to hear your thoughts and feedback.
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.
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.”
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:
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.
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.
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.