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The new Messenger officially came out of beta today for over 300 million customers worldwide. We’re excited to announce that Facebook chat, one of the new features that made the Messenger beta so popular, is now available to 30.1 million Messenger customers in 7 additional countries: Canada, Australia, Netherlands, Italy, Spain, India, and Turkey. This doubles the number of customers who can now use Facebook chat in Messenger. These customers join 27.8 million others from the United States, United Kingdom, France, Brazil, Germany, and Russia, who have been able to use Facebook chat in Messenger since the Messenger beta refresh back in August. We’ll continue to introduce Facebook chat to more regions over time, as quickly as we can.
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 one place to see and comment on them. With Facebook chat integration in Messenger, you now also have one place to chat with all your friends. By connecting Facebook with Messenger, you get an always-on “people app” on your PC that gives you instant access and notifications as people come online in Facebook or Messenger.
As always, you’re in control of who you connect and share with on Windows Live. If you choose to connect your Windows Live Messenger account to Facebook, you can then choose what types of activities you want to allow, including chat. And of course, you can change your preferences at any time from your profile page.
If you do choose to turn on Facebook chat and updates in Messenger, those features are also available to you from other places you connect to Messenger, like from your Hotmail inbox, or from the Messenger iPhone app.
Download the new Messenger as part of Windows Live Essentials 2011 today.
We hope more of you will enjoy this deeper integration with Facebook, and we look forward to partnering with more leading services across the internet.
Jeff Kunins Group Program Manager, Windows Live
We are pleased to announce that Windows Live Essentials 2011 for Windows 7 and Windows Vista is now available for download! (Releasing in 48 languages over the next few hours, so if your language is not yet available, it will be very soon.) Windows Live Essentials 2011 was designed and built to connect your PC to the services you use every day. We’re also announcing today that Dell will be the first global PC manufacturer to ship PCs with Windows Live Essentials 2011 and Windows 7 pre-installed, just in time for your holiday purchases. Many other PC manufacturers are also planning to make Windows Live Essentials 2011 available and we’ll continue to keep you updated as they start releasing.
I want to offer a special thank you to the millions of people who installed the beta! Our beta users helped us identify and address issues, with over two thousand forum posts and comments. In today’s release, we’ve addressed 95% of all bugs reported by beta users, leading to improvements that you’ll see across the suite.
Windows Live Essentials 2011 was designed from the ground up for Windows 7. You can pin your applications to the taskbar and use jump lists to quickly get to common tasks. The ribbon brings common tasks to the front, letting you filter photos, change your font, or publish to your favorite services in a single click.
For parents, Windows Live Family Safety gives you the tools to help keep your kids safer on the Internet.
If you have more than one PC, or a PC and a Mac, Windows Live Mesh helps you sync your files and folders across your PCs and connect back to your PC from virtually anywhere.
Windows Live connects your Windows PC to the services you use every day. Use Window Live Photo Gallery to share photos with your friends on SkyDrive, Flickr, SmugMug, Facebook, and more.
Create a video using Windows Live Movie Maker and instantly publish it to YouTube.
Stay in touch with your friends on Facebook, LinkedIn, and MySpace using the new Windows Live Messenger.
Use Windows Live Writer to update your blog on Wordpress.com, Blogger, TypePad, and many more blogging services.
Use Windows Live Mail to keep track of your email from Hotmail, Gmail, Yahoo, and more.
Get started and download Windows Live Essentials 2011 today. It is being released in 48 languages over the next few hours, so if you don’t see it in your language yet, you should see it very soon. If you’re running Windows Vista or Windows 7 on your PC, make sure you have the latest Windows updates installed before you install Windows Live Essentials (see the system requirements here). If your computer is still running Windows XP, you can, of course, continue to use the current Windows Live Essentials software, and then switch to Windows Live Essentials 2011 when you buy a new PC or upgrade to Windows 7.
Together with Windows 7 and the new Internet Explorer 9 beta, Windows Live Essentials completes your Windows experience and connects your PC to the services you use every day. Try it out and let us know what you think!
On behalf of the entire Windows Live team, thanks for trying Windows Live Essentials 2011!
Chris Jones Vice President, Windows Live engineering
Not too long ago, account hijacking was an issue limited mostly to financial service websites. Now the practice has grown to threaten other web services like email, disrupting millions of accounts every year. When an email account is compromised by hijackers, it violates the privacy of the account owner, can harm those in their address book, and adds additional costs to the services fighting the abuse. This type of identity theft costs users and services billions of dollars every year.
Microsoft is addressing the problem on multiple fronts. Last week we purged hijackers from legitimate Hotmail accounts that had been identified as compromised, and earlier this month we used legal action to take down a range of domains used by hijackers known as the Waledac botnet. Today, we are releasing new features to safeguard everyone’s account from hijackers. These updates help you protect your password and, in the unlikely event that a hijacker gains access to your account, provide a more secure recovery path so you will always be able to get your account back and kick the hijackers out.
Hotmail starts by helping you keep your password safe from hijackers. Because hijackers:
Despite these precautions, account compromise can still happen. Today we are rolling out new features to detect the hijackers and help you to quickly and reliably take back your account.
Spammers traditionally created their own accounts, but as we’ve cracked down on this practice, they’ve resorted to hijacking and exploiting the accounts of legitimate users to send spam. With today’s release, we are taking a step forward by detecting compromised email accounts, those co-owned by the legitimate user and the hijacker. We detect them with high confidence using heuristics based on login and account activity, and stop the abuse by locking the hijacker out and closing back doors they may have set up, like using vacation auto reply messages to send spam. At the same time, we begin working with the rightful owner to reclaim the account, recognizing the urgency of the issue.
The fastest way to get your account back, whether it was locked or you simply forgot your password, is to reset the password using account proofs. Proofs are like spare keys. If you set them up in advance, you can later use them to prove you are the legitimate account owner. Up until now, we’ve offered two proofs, an alternate email address and a personal question paired with a secret answer. However, there were limitations to these. For example, only 25% of people with a secret question actually remembered their answer when needed.
Today, we are introducing two new kinds of proofs for account recovery.
Additionally, today’s release is making account recovery more secure in Hotmail. Before you can add a new proof or change any existing ones, you will need to be able to access at least one existing proof. For example, if your account was already set up with an alternate email proof and you wanted to add a cell phone number as well, you would need to use the alternate email address to do it. This means that even if a hijacker steals your password, they can’t lock you out of your account or create backdoors for themselves. You will always be able to get your account back and kick the hijackers out.
If your account has no proofs set up and you lose access, then to get it back you will need to work with our support team at www.windowslivehelp.com/accountrecovery.
Account security is more important than ever, and with this release, and Hotmail is making your email account more secure than ever.
John Scarrow General Manager - Safety Services
Over the last few weeks, we’ve spent a good bit of time talking about our approach to partnering with the web, and as part of that, how we’re deeply integrating with the leading consumer services that you find most valuable. Earlier today, I had the opportunity to get on stage at TechCrunch Disrupt, and with Toni Schneider, CEO of Automattic (the parent company of WordPress.com), announce an exciting partnership between our companies.
As we looked at customers’ blogging needs and what different companies were providing, we were particularly interested in what WordPress.com is doing. They have a host of impressive capabilities – from a scalable platform and leading spam protection, to great personalization and customization. WordPress powers over 8.5% of the web, is used on over 26 million sites, and WordPress.com is seen by over 250 million people every month. Not only that, Automattic is a company filled with great people focused on improving blogging experiences. So rather than having Windows Live invest in a competing blogging service, we decided the best thing we could do for our customers was to give them a great blogging solution through WordPress.com.
As we looked at how we brought Windows Live and WordPress.com together, there were three big things we wanted to deliver:
There are 30 million people who are actively using Windows Live Spaces and have been eagerly awaiting the next set of new blogging features. For these customers, Windows Live and WordPress.com have worked together to build a simple way to move your blog posts, comments, and integrated photos right over to WordPress.com and start taking advantage of all their new features. And we’ll also redirect all your old Spaces URLs to your new blog, so you don’t lose any visitors along the way. If you want to get started today, just visit your existing Space and you’ll see a prompt like this:
If you’re not ready to migrate today, you can also choose to download your blog content, migrate later, or delete your Space. There’s more information posted online to help you with your options, and if you have additional questions on the migration, please visit the WordPress.com support center.
With Messenger Connect, any website can easily give their customers the ability to share updates with their Messenger friends, and WordPress.com has done exactly this.
So, if you have a blog on WordPress.com, we know that one of the things that is likely important to you is the ability to share the blog with your friends. Of course, on WordPress.com, you can make the blog public and people can subscribe to the blog via RSS or you can just email a link to the site. But when you connect your Messenger account to Wordpress.com, you can have new posts on your WordPress.com blog automatically send a notification for each new blog post to your Messenger friends’ feeds.
Starting today, when new Windows Live customers go to create a new blog on the web, we’ll help them create that new blog on WordPress.com. And when Windows Live Essentials 2011 releases later this fall, Windows Live Writer will also use WordPress.com as its default blogging solution.
We’re very excited to work with WordPress.com to give our shared customers a great experience that connects the fantastic blogging capabilities on WordPress.com with the leading communications and sharing services on Windows Live. We hope you enjoy this too, and we look forward to partnering with even more great services from around the web.
Dharmesh Mehta Director, Windows Live Product Management
In just over 100 days since Office Web Apps launched, more than 20 million people in the U.S., U.K., Canada, and Ireland have used them – including Hotmail, Office 2010, and SkyDrive.
With more than 25,000 comments so far, we're releasing more new features today, shaped directly by your feedback. And, we're making Office Web Apps available in 7 more countries: Australia, Austria, Belgium, France, Germany, Russia, and Switzerland.
When Office Web Apps launched in June, a big focus for us was bringing the Office Web Apps right to your inbox – since this is where most people collaborate on documents today. We also focused on making sure that people could collaborate in the cloud without destroying the formatting of their existing documents.
To share some of what we have learned since launch, I’ll use one of our newest features, PowerPoint embedding.
As you can see, over 90% of online docs were first created in Office on the desktop. And people using Hotmail or Office 2010 are rapidly adopting new ways to share and access their existing docs.
Since launch, we’ve been working hard to listen to you and deliver the features you need. Starting today, those new features are available to everybody, including people who live in the new supported regions.
While using the Office Web Apps has been popular, we’ve heard from you that you often want to take advantage of the full power of Office on your desktop. We’ve made this easier than ever before – you’ll now see “Open in [Office app]” when you’re browsing your files, letting you jump in quickly. Since over 90% of documents on SkyDrive were first created in Office on the desktop, we hope this new feature will make it easy to bring your document back to your desktop for additional editing.
If a picture is worth a thousand words, what’s a great PowerPoint presentation or Excel chart worth? You can now embed public PowerPoint presentations and Excel workbooks on your blog or website. When you embed presentations, people can also view your presentation in full screen mode with all of your animations and transitions. And when you embed Excel spreadsheets, you can update data in Excel on the desktop, and your spreadsheet will automatically be updated on the web. You can even publish interactive PivotTables and forms (view handy tips & tricks here).
For instructions and a video on embedding, please visit The Office Blog.
Earlier this summer we launched the ability to browse and view your Word and PowerPoint documents on your mobile phone. We’ve now added Excel workbooks to that list, so you can view those charts and tables while on the go, wherever you are.
And of course, we’ve fixed bugs you’ve told us about, made improvements across the board, and generally improved the performance and reliability of your experience.
Finally, we’re making Office on the web available to people in Germany, Austria, Switzerland, France, Belgium, Russia and Australia, in addition to the markets we already support. (Also, people who are using Office 2010 get access immediately, regardless of where they are.)
Over the coming weeks, we’ll also be rolling out Hotmail updates in those same markets. Not in a region we support just yet for these features? You can get early access by going to this link.
Jason Moore Principal Lead Program Manager, Windows Live SkyDrive