February 2008 - LiveSide - News blog

Office Live Workspace launched last December and just got its first update, what's new:

• A new Activity pane to help you keep track of what’s happening in your workspaces and email notifications so you always know when the people you share with make updates. This feature is a lot of fun and makes it easy to see at glance the changes happening in your workspace and in individual documents. Now you’ll know when someone comments on your document, adds a note, or updates an important list.
• New support for adding multiple documents to your workspaces. The Add multiple documents button makes it is easier than ever to bring your documents into a workspace by browsing and selecting files from your computer or dragging and dropping files on the document uploader.
• New permalinks for sharing direct hyperlinks to your workspaces and documents. Now you can bookmark individual workspaces and items in your workspace using the “add to favorites” tool in your web browser or copy the address bar and paste those links into emails to share with others.
• A new Share workspace UI to easily invite others to your workspace. With the improved address book buttons you can quickly add people from your Windows Live addresses book (contacts from Windows Live Hotmail and Windows Live Messenger) and people you have shared with before. You can also include more details in your invitation with the larger message box and choose to CC yourself on the invitation.

Besides these, other fixes and improvements have been made and the Office Live add-in has been updated.

Note on Office Live Workspace Registration:
US pre-registrants are invited into the beta on a first-come, first-served basis as quickly as possible. The service will be opened to the world and offered in other localized languages in 2008. You can pre-register at http://www.officelive.com/, when your workspace is ready you will receive an email.

More read of interest:
Our first look at Office Live Workspaces
Office Live Workspaces: Our interview with Kirk Gregerson
Office Live Renamed: New offering announced: Office Live Workspaces

Later today we should see the reincarnation of MSN Toolbar in beta form (codename Salsa). Like many older MSN products, it migrated over to the new Windows Live brand early 2007, however as part of the gradual drift back, its been revamped with a new look.

So what's new apart from the Vista styled UI? Well perhaps the biggest thing is that the toolbar is powered by Silverlight, which adds an extra dimension to the features on offer. This enables the drop-down MSN chanel previews, showing the latest content from within the MSN portal without requiring the user to move from the internet page they are currently browsing. From the same preview pane users can also chose to search that part of the site, which brings us onto the 2nd main feature - Live Search.

Although web search and toolbars have gone hand in hand for as long as I can remember, the new MSN Toolbar beta adds a few twists. Firstly, and definitely most controversially, when you perform a search query on another search engine, the toolbar search box will auto-populate itself should you wish to view results from Live Search. This seems like a bit of a grey area in terms of user privacy, so I'm sure we'll inevitably hear complaints about it soon enough. As mentioned above, the toolbar also allows users to tailor their search to specific MSN channels using the preview panes.

Finally there's a breaking news feature, bringing the latest news direct to your browser. At the end of the day though, a toolbar is a toolbar, so there's not a huge amount to get excited about - what is exciting is seeing just how much Silverlight could be used for. Of course there is the added bonus for Microsoft in that requiring users to install Silverlight for core products such as this will increase penetration into the mass-market. And that's not necessarily a bad thing.

Users who want to participate in the managed beta on Connect will be able to sign up soon through the Available Connections page. The toolbar homepage is also up, however there is no download available yet.

Update: The beta is now accepting signups, looks like there won't be a public beta immediately.

See, is this so hard?  The Email Support Space blog posts tonight, reporting that "nearly all customers are once again able to sign in", with some specific information coming for customers who are still unable to login, "once you log in" (ummmm, ahhhh, no, wait - deep breath - don't go there).  Anyway whatever the problem was (and problems do happen) we're glad to hear that it's fixed, and especially glad to see even this little bit of communication from Microsoft on the subject.  Here's the post, in total:

February 28

WIndows Live ID and Hotmail Service Restored

Good afternoon everyone -

We've been busy working to restore our services after the recent downtime, and by our estimates, nearly all customers are once again able to sign in with their Live ID and access services like Hotmail and Messenger.

There is a very small group of customers who are still unable to login, but we're hoping to restore that final bit of service Thursday afternoon (today), PST. If you are a member of this group, once you log in, you will see a message from us "Hotmail Customer Support" with some specific information about your experience and instructions if you need more assistance.

No service provider likes their service to be down, and we do everything possible to avoid it and then mitigate when it happens. I am especially grateful for your patience and good humor during these times.

Thanks.

Michael

7:13 PM | Add a comment | Send a message | View trackbacks (0) | Blog it

We'd be interested to see the "specific information about your experience", so if you're one of the lucky ones, and wouldn't mind posting the info in the comments, it would be much appreciated.  And special thanks to "Michael", for the information - that's much appreciated, too.

With Mix08 less than a week away, details of what's coming are slowly creeping out: details of the IE8 beta, Scott Guthrie has posted details about Silverlight 2.0. And now the Windows Live Platform team is announcing today a series of new and updated features, including a new Messenger Library API, significant updates to Silverlight Streaming, an updated Windows Live Contacts API and Windows Live Photos API, and new Quick Apps and Visual Studio tools. Update: David Treadwell has just made the announcement on dev.live.com.

We'll go into more detail (and will be trying out ourselves) many of the new toys soon, but for now here's a quick look:

• Messenger Library API beta
  • This new addition to the Windows Live Platform family will allow third party developers to build their own complete custom Messenger applications on cross platform websites, using a new set of APIs to access and deliver Messenger functionality to websites.  This means that websites could build their own front ends to Messenger on their websites, with all of the functionality (and a good deal more) of a Messenger client.
    
  
  
• Silverlight Streaming updated:
  • Silverlight Streaming, which has been in Alpha and offering 4gb of storage space and 22mb file limits, is now in beta. 
  • Upgraded to 10gb of storage space and 100mb+ file size limits
  • 1400kbps streaming speeds (free for up to 500,000 minutes/mo)
  • Better file manipulation with the ability to use Windows Explorer
  • and better support for Visual Studio 2008 with Windows Live Tools for Visual Studio,
  • You can take a look at a Hi-Def video streamed from Silverlight Streaming video here, and we'll have more soon.
  
  
• Windows Live Contacts API Beta
  • The Windows Live Contacts API Beta allows people to use their Windows Live contact information (including Hotmail, Messenger, and Mobile contacts) with any site—while keeping complete control of their data.  Featuring Windows Live Delegation Authentication, the Contacts API can return Full or "invite" information (many sites just need name and primary email for invitations, and the Contacts API now allows that without exposing any other Windows Live Contacts information).
  
  
• Windows Live Photo API CTP
  • The updated Windows Live Photo API gives full control of photos stored on Spaces using the Atom Publishing Protocol or WebDAV, and now photos shown on a third party site are not required to go through the site - the API will call Spaces directly, and photos can be shown as thumbnails as well as time-limited permalinks (yeah, sounds contradictory...):
    
    
• Windows Live ID Delegated Authentication
  • Windows Live ID Delegated Authentication enables any web applications to request permission from users to access their Windows Live data
  • Windows Live servers securely handle access control and user authentication
  • Some Web sites would request Live ID and password – this is not necessary with Delegated Authentication
  • Users can manage and revoke access at any time
  
  
• Windows Live Quick Apps
  • Two new Quick Apps, Contoso University and AdventureWorksResorts have been added, and Tafiti, the search app, has been updated.  We'll have more on Tafiti and the Quick Apps soon, in the mean time, Angus has some more information on them.
  
  
• Windows Live Tools for Visual Studio
  • 4 key enhancements:
    • Windows Live Messenger IM Control integration (which Angus hinted at)
    • Deploy your controls to partially-trusted environments, including medium trust web hosting farms
    • Silverlight 2 SDK compatibility
    • No longer depends on ASP.NET Futures
  
  
• ATOM Publishing Protocol
  • Atom is a simple XML format for exchanging data in the form of feeds (which Windows Live Writer already supports)
  • The Atom Publishing Protocol (AtomPub) is a lightweight HTTP-based protocol for publishing and storing Atom-encoded feeds
  • Windows Live services will align with a consistent AtomPub-based interface

This is a lot of information to throw down all at once - but we'll be going into more detail in the upcoming days, as well as hearing more about a lot of it at Mix. We're writing this under embargo a few hours before it's set to go live, so we don't have a lot of live links yet, but we're sure Angus will have more on his blog, and of course there will be lots of info at dev.live.com.

It made Scoble cry, and soon it can make you cry too. The website for the latest Microsoft Research project, WorldWide Telescope, is now up at http://wwtelescope.com/. Here's how Robert describes it:

"So, back to the World Wide Telescope. You drag around the sky. There’s Mars. There’s the big dipper. There’s Betelguese. Etc. It’s just like the star party you probably attended in college.

But it has one difference between any telescope you’ve ever looked at.

You can zoom. Zoom. Zoom. Zoom.

We picked a point of light inside the big dipper. Zoom. Zoom. Zoom. Zoom. Holy ***, it’s two galaxies colliding. It looked like a star. Zoom. Zoom. Zoom."

No sign of the download yet, with Scoble saying its in private alpha right now. If you're interested in finding out more, Sunshine posted a bunch of info on it last week. We'll let you know when its open to all.

Update: Thanks to Scoble's Twitter, here's the embed of the TED talk featuring WorldWide Telescope:

http://www.ted.com/talks/view/id/224

Update2: Thanks to the pointer in the comments, there's also a small screenshot now up on the WorldWide Telescope website.

Apparently a fairly widespread disruption in some/all LiveID and Live services has been occuring for a good part of the morning (GMT-8).  We don't know more at this point except to say Messenger had issues signing in here, as did Windows Live Mail, and currently although I am logged in to Live ID I can't log out, with a "Service Unavailable" message.

Others are reporting problems as well.  We will keep you posted if we hear any official word on the issues, but for now, if you are having problems signing in to and out of the Windows Live services, you're not the only one.

Update: Microsoft has issued a statement acknowledging the issue, according to a number of sources:

"We are aware that some customers may be experiencing difficulty accessing their Windows Live accounts," Microsoft said in an emailed statement. "We're actively investigating the cause and are working to take the appropriate steps to remedy the situation as rapidly as possible."

Update #2: Service appears to be restored, although Microsoft is not saying what caused the problems.  Mary Jo Foley has the details.

The Windows Mobile Developer Center has been renewed. First of all you'll notice there are 4 big boxes delivering the latest articles per category:

Beside those boxes, on the top right, you'll find “Getting Started with Windows Mobile”. There you will find everything you need to get started such as tutorials, documentation and tools. Where would we be without those! Right beneath that there's a section that rotates through a group of Mobile MVPs and a section where Events get displayed.

Also on the renewed site, below those 4 boxes, you'll find the latest Mobile Team's blog post displayed in full and a box with excerpts of the latest blog posts by Jim Wilson, Loke Uei, Rob Tiffany, Visual Studio for Devices, the NETCF team, the SQL Server Compact team and others to keep you up to date with the latest developments in the Windows Mobile community.

That's quite a bit of information on one, easy to navigate, page! If you still can't find what you are looking for and need some expert help you can search/ask on one of the Windows Mobile Forums, which also have a dedicated section at the bottom of the renewed Windows Mobile Developer Center.

At the start of the year there was some discussion around whether MSN Premium offered good value for money in light of all these new and free Windows Live services. While we still think its great if you want several ad free accounts, we've heard that it could be about to lose yet another one of its unique features in favour of the free approach.

Currently if you use Windows Live Calendar (the MSN migrated calendar, not the new one in beta), the only way you are able to access it via a desktop client is using the Microsoft Outlook Connector. Also required is an MSN Premium subscription, and no Hotmail Plus doesn't work. However this looks set to change as a new Outlook Connector is currently in dogfood testing internally, and we've heard that this one provides Windows Live Calendar access from within Outlook, to all users. So as well as updating the connector to support the new and in beta calendar service, Microsoft looks set to make this feature freely available to all.

While this comes as somewhat of a surprise, it probably shouldn't do. Stretching our minds back to when MSN Hotmail existed, the first Outlook Connector was entirely a premium feature. Then along came Windows Live Hotmail and the Outlook Connector was updated to provide access to emails for all. Along comes Windows Live Calendar beta, and surprise surprise we seem to have access to calendar items via Outlook on the way for all users.

So while this is good news for those not with an MSN Premium subscription, those that have one and don't get it for free via their internet service provider, might want to start thinking about swapping over to Hotmail Plus. Now where's the Windows Live Calendar desktop application I wonder...

Looks like Microsoft is ramping up the teasers for Mix08. Activewin just posted the text from a Internet Explorer 8 Microsoft Connect invitation email.

"Greetings from the Internet Explorer Team! We are nearing the launch of Windows Internet Explorer 8 Beta 1 and we will be making it available for the general public to download and test. IE8 Beta 1 is focused on the developer community, with the goal of gaining valuable feedback to improve Internet Explorer 8 during the development process..."

Not to be outdone, over on the IEBlog, they are talking about how websites can detect the new browser.

When released, the IE8 beta will introduce an updated User-Agent string.  For IE8, we’ve simply replaced "MSIE 7.0" with "MSIE 8.0". 

No surprises there then. Looks like this is just setting the stage for Mix08, which we'll talk about in more detail soon. We're hoping that IE8 will help the Windows & Windows Live Software+Services approach evolve, though the "roaming of favorites and browser settings" may still be some way off.

Unfortunately there doesn't seem to be any signup pages for the IE8 beta yet, but we'll keep our eyes open.

We just posted on what we had noticed about an increase for SkyDrive storage to 5gb, and we're pleasantly surprised that the SkyDrive team has just posted on their blog, announcing that indeed, SkyDrive is now at 5gb, that it's out of beta, and that it is now available in 38 countries:

SkyDrive is also available now in 38 countries/regions. In addition to Great Britain, India, and the U.S., we’re live in Argentina, Australia, Austria, Belgium, Bolivia, Brazil, Canada, Chile, Colombia, Denmark, the Dominican Republic, Ecuador, El Salvador, Finland, France, Guatemala, Honduras, Italy, Japan, Mexico, the Netherlands, New Zealand, Nicaragua, Norway, Panama, Paraguay, Peru, Puerto Rico, Portugal, South Korea, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, Taiwan, and Turkey.

Again, great work SkyDrive team (and don't be afraid to post once in a while!).

Thanks to tipster (tips*at*liveside*dot*net) Liam, it looks like we're about to see a significant upgrade to the online storage feature from Windows Live, SkyDrive, to 5gb free:

We've called for an increase in the storage capacity, if only to make a splash in the marketplace, and this upcoming announcement (at least we hope they make an announcement, the translucency veil around Windows Live seems to have thickened recently) is a good start in that direction.  We're expecting the service to come out of beta, possibly as early as next week, although nothing is for certain at this point.  Hopefully the access to SkyDrive will be broader, as well, opening up to more countries as it comes out of beta, which is fairly standard procedure.

You can check out SkyDrive (currently in beta at 1gb free) from the home page, or via your Windows Live Spaces account.

UPDATE (2/21 -10:21am pst):  We just checked our LiveSide on Spaces SkyDrive account, and indeed we're at 5gb :

And Yay! the SkyDrive team has posted, great work guys!: SkyDrive now out of Beta

comScore just posted their search share numbers for January 2008 and it's bad news for Yahoo.  Yahoo took a 0.7% hit, while Google got a small 0.1% bump.  Windows Live remained the same as last month, so there is not much to report there.  Even though Google's search share rose, it appears that Yahoo's lost share went mostly to AOL and Ask.  The real question is whether Yahoo's share will continue to fall, or if this is just a fluke.  After all, Yahoo was up 0.5% the month before.  With a potential acquisition on the horizon, you can bet that everyone will be watching these numbers closely in the months to come

We can already look at Earth with Virtual Earth, but what about the Sky? Microsoft doesn't have anything for that yet. Yes, that's right, YET! This might change on February 27th at the TED Conference in Monterey California:

Very interesting if you are into stargazing or astronomy. I hope it will be easier to use than Google Sky, I just had a first look at that today and it's still confusing me...

New upgrade round, in two phases, coming up:

Phase 1. - For those who still aren't using Windows Live Messenger 8.5 (Windows XP and Vista, optional upgrade): 

First, everyone running Windows XP or Windows Vista will get a prompt encouraging you to upgrade. When you accept the upgrade, the new unified installer will launch and start upgrading Messenger. While it’s installing, you’ll have the option to download and install other Windows Live applications. You don’t have to take any of them, but we think you’ll like them and hope you’ll give them a try.

It will take a couple of weeks for us to get this upgrade out to all users, so if you don’t get it right away don’t worry, it’s coming. If you don’t want to wait, you can go to http://get.live.com/messenger/overview to download and install Messenger 8.5 right now.

Phase 2. - If you are still using a Beta version of Windows Live Messenger 8.5 (forced upgrade): 

After everyone’s gotten the optional upgrade, those of you still running a beta version of Messenger 8.5 will receive a required upgrade to the final version. When this phase kicks in you’ll be blocked from logging in until you complete the upgrade...

A special note for those of you running Messenger 8.5 Beta on Windows XP 64-bit or Windows 2003 Server
The final version of Messenger 8.5 will not install or run on your OS. We don’t want you to get stuck out in the cold so you will not receive the mandatory upgrade to the final version. However, these operating systems won’t be supported by future Messenger versions. You may stay on your current beta version, or to get to a more stable final version we recommend that you uninstall Messenger 8.5 and go back to Messenger 8.1. 

Full article

Update on the note for Windows XP 64-bit and Windows 2003 server:
Messenger 8.5 itself works fine on these operating systems, it is the new Live installer that does not. Thanks to Jonathan Kay for notifying me, more info can be found in his article: Attention Messenger team: Messenger 8.5 works on Windows Server/Windows XP x64 + petition

News is filtering out that a new version of Spaces has been released, apparently last week, on Valentine's Day (Feb 14).  Our friend Dev at Hack MSN Spaces has a partial list of the changes, the most visible being the inclusion of a "Common Friends" box, similar to what's available on Facebook.

Dev lists two other changes - the removal of list descriptions (and changing lists to bold), and a more detailed description for updated Spaces (when you're not signed in).  Then in Dev's comments, Mat has a more complete list of the version changes that he's compiled.  Unfortunately it's in Italian, so we're forced to fire up Windows Live Translator:

Here the directory of the new modernizations:

• The list friendly introduces “friends in municipality”, already present functionality in the Social Networking di Facebook, “Common Friends”.
• This new option marks it to us if a Windows Live Spaces has friends that we have in municipality.
• The list friendly introduces notes on every single customer in the main page.
• Always in the List Friendly, now, there is a better management in Preview Mode: “all” and “invited”. 
  • It lists introduce with the titles them in block letter and in those lateral ones more the visualization of the descriptions of every element is not previewed. 
  • Improved the option for the insertion of a new directory, with the tipologia to choose, tito it and name. 
    Changed the icona “it incorporates” in the egg whites photographic 
  • Windows Live Bar already introduces icona the MSN from some day. 
  • The visualization of the comments is changed: the address is beside the name and it is not more at the end of the written content.

(Note: "Egg Whites" = "album".  Ahhh the joys of translation.)

• The Egg whites Photographic modification introduces the new option “module”. 
  • Cliccando on it, will have a page that will concur to personalize the reproduction of the images:
  • - the title it.
  • - Speed of reproduction: slow, medium or fast.
  • - Reproduction of all the egg whites or personalized: possibility to reproduce all our egg whites, or only those chosen ones from the owner.
  • - To hide the possibility to select egg whites, therefore not to give to way to a visitor the possibility to choose which egg whites to see in the homepage.
  • - Possibility to order to the sequence of reproduction of our egg whites, dulling the option “selects” and inserting the number in the case “order” beside the egg whites.
  • From now it is concurred to expose in blog the more photographic egg whites.
  • The concurred maximum is of six egg whites.
• New page assigned for the events that we want to make to see in our profile.  http://idblog.spaces.live.com/sharedevents/

Currently this “small” has not been made official null from the official sources care release.

News expects, above all on the service in beta still closed the public Italian: Skydrive (in reality I have published the way in order to approach the service storage from first of September).

It is hypothetical that Skydrive is ready to the official release, from the moment that the option of access in Windows Live Spaces (with Italian interface) is present in the cache of memory of Windows Live Search.

The same speech is worth for the future service Windows Live Groups.

At all it is not excluded that they can be to us other innovationes to short.

Al moment is all and news from the official sources expects.

OK we have no way of actually knowing if this list is complete, or official, since a) our Italian sucks, and b) no one on the Spaces team has bothered to post on their official blog since Dec 20 of last year.  Hey guys, you run a blog service!  Try blogging once in a while, it's catching on!  Sheesh.

Anyway, Mat has some nice screenshots, as does Dev.  Check it out.