Microsoft Outlook Connector is a free program that you can use with Microsoft Office Outlook 2003 or Microsoft Office Outlook 2007 to access and manage your Microsoft Windows Live Hotmail or Microsoft Office Live Mail accounts. I tried setting it up for my Windows Live Hotmail account and captured some screen shots during the setup process. Unfortunately, it didn’t go quite as well as I was hoping it would and ended up with the dreaded ‘Not Responding’ error.
I had just read Long Zheng’s blog about Interactive Office 2007 advertising on MSN when I stumbled across a Nissan advertisment in Windows Live Maps.
The billboard in the map links directly to the 2007 Nissan Sentra site which is pretty cool and quite surprising since I wasn’t aware of Microsoft adCenter allowing clients to advertise directly on Windows Live Maps. The Virtual Earth/ Live Maps blog has discussed advertising from the sky and how oblique imagery lets you peek at the rooftop, billboard and roadside advertising but hasn’t mentioned anything related to advertising on the site. Either way, a lot of nice stuff has started showing up on various Live properties and is slowly paving way for what will hopefully be an exciting Mix 2007.
WOW! I just came across this news release from the Office of University Communications at the University of Pennsylvania. Below is a quick excerpt:
The University of Pennsylvania has partnered with Microsoft to enhance the communications platform it offers to many of its students.
Beginning in the fall semester, students in the School of Arts and Sciences and the Wharton School will have the option of using a customized version of Windows Live called Penn Live to access e-mail and a full suite of online communications services.
Penn Live will host student e-mail accounts, including support for both mobile and offline access. The arrangement with Microsoft will provide students with 2 gigabytes of storage space. Other features include calendaring and contact management; Windows Live Messenger instant messaging and file sharing; Windows Live Spaces for personal web publishing, blogging and photo sharing; and FolderShare, a private peer-to-peer network that allows users to synchronize files between multiple devices and share files with other student users.
Obviously I’m adding spice to the news release, but what immediately jumps to mind is did UPenn just select Windows Live Mail over Gmail when Google has just been pushing out features and improvements to their existing offering. Google Docs will soon have a presentation component, the integration of Google Talk within the mail interface and having POP access to all your mail are just some small but very nice features. One can’t even start to sing praises of the use of labels for organization of mail and the excellent calendar component. Yet with all these features, a committee of students and administration selected Windows Live Mail over Gmail. Impressive! Good job Microsoft and especially with the Ivy League win.
The other part of the press release also gives you some insight on what to expect from Microsoft in the next few months – the relaunch of FolderShare or Windows Live Drive?
Windows Live Mail M7 does not have a way to export contacts. Thankfully, Ben Poon, has created Windows Live Mail Contacts Exporter that helps you accomplish the much needed but non-existant way of exporting contacts from Windows Live Mail. If you’re one of the early adopters of Windows Live Mail, this may help solve some issues with synchronizing contacts to Outlook or your Windows mobile device.
Windows Live Writer is available for download. I’m surprised they don’t have their own subdomain on live.com
If you’ve installed Windows Live Messenger, you may notice a number of files listed in the root of your primary drive that end with .sqm
There’s a post on the CCleaner forums indicating that SQM is the accronym for Service Quality Monitor and the files are supposedly not needed. Does anyone have more information on these files?
Windows Live Custom Domains have just announced the latest release with a number of features, the most exciting one of which is Open Membership. Earlier in May I had really pushed for more features tailored towards greater customization of the domain, custom advertisement insertions and the ability to the create mailing lists. Windows Live Custom Domains Manager handles the ability for mailing list creation. Now with Open Membership, another one of my requests is offered by default. Nice.
Directly from the Custom Domains sites Open Membership is a feature that will allow your web site visitors to create their own e-mail accounts at your domain.
What are the benefits?
Chandu Thota announces that Windows Live Local has just been updated with a whole bunch of new features:
I’m trying out the user collections feature by creating a collection on Temple University.
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