While at Redmond last week I had a chance to meet with some members of the Windows Live Custom Domains team. I pushed or asked for three requests:

- Ability to sign up directly for an @yourdomain address directly without an administrator approval

- Branding or customization of a domain by way of preselecting a default logo or theme for the site

- Banner Advertisement Sharing

- Mailing Lists

These requests were selfishly motivated to try and determine when I might be able to switch The Zambian Mail and Messenger service from Everyone.net to Windows Live Custom Domains. I figured I would deal with issues such as mail and user account migration once the above issues were resolved. To my surprise I found out that Microsoft had released a Custom Domains SDK to address some of these issues and earlier this morning I came across a news item from Bink.nu indicating that Frameworks had released a new application called Windows Live Custom Domains Manager. The application allows you to:

• Veirfy Service Status
• Verify MX Configuration
• Add New Users
• Delete Users
• Import Existing Users
• Evict Existing Users
• Import User List
• Export User List
• Centralized Multi-domain Management

Now it seems like the only pressing issue is branding or customization of the domain and then I think I may actually switch to Windows Live Custom Domains.

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