We had a chance this week to sit down and talk with Chris Bryant, Director, Office Product Management at Microsoft, to talk a little bit more about Office Web Applications and specifically how Windows Live and consumer users will benefit from these new web based Office apps.  Chris was kind enough to give us an overview demo of the web apps, which we’ll get to, but we talked to Chris about what users want from web applications:

 Chris Bryant on Office Web Applications (Vimeo)

Office Web Applications is in Technical Preview now, slated for a Spring 2010 release.  As Chris says in the video, all of the apps aren’t fully functional (and OneNote isn’t available at all, yet), but Microsoft wanted to get some feedback on the apps as well as getting an idea of how running Office “in the cloud” would work.  The Office 2010 Technical Preview is now closed, but you can sign up to receive early notification of new information on Office Web Apps, and possibly still get in:

Office Web Apps Technical Beta early notification

Office Web Apps Press Release, Sept 17, 2009

Office Web Apps Fact Sheet

In this second part of our interview with Mike Torres, a PM for Windows Live Movie Maker, we talk a bit more about how WLMM was built: the weekly meetings with teams from Office and Windows about how to best use the Ribbon;  on the hard choices any software developer has to make; on some of Mike’s favorite features; and on reaction to the release.

LiveSide with Mike Torres Part 2 (on our Facebook Fan page)

Mike mentions a couple of specific “tips”, one on the time zoom feature.  It’s in the lower right corner:

Moving the slider zooms in or out, pretty basic but good to know.  He also mentions some keyboard shortcuts.  Along with the usual ones like Ctrl-X to cut and Ctrl-V to paste, these shortcuts can make editing a bit easier:

Windows Live Movie Maker version 1.0 for Vista and Windows 7 was released nearly two weeks ago, and we gave you an early glimpse of it when it first came out (and even before that).  Today we were able to head over to Redmond and talk with a longtime LiveSide friend, Mike Torres about Movie Maker, and take the product for a bit of a spin at the same time.

Since we’re uploading to YouTube, we split the interview into two parts to keep under the 10 minute limit YouTube imposes.  In the second part of the interview we’ll show you a few tricks Mike pointed us to, but in part one we talk to Mike about his history at Microsoft (you may remember him from Spaces, but he’s worked on a number of Windows Live projects), about building WL Movie Maker from the ground up (as in every line of code is new!), and about program management in a project like this:

UPDATE: OK so our ability to upload .wmv files to YouTube is borked, with or without Movie Maker.  The .wmv I created in Movie Maker works fine locally (and ok in this self-hosted Silverlight player), but any wmv I upload to YouTube has audio sync issues.  Happens from 2 computers and numerous files here, maybe it's our account, who knows.  TBH pretty tired of dealing with it right now, but here's the video, for now):

LiveSide.net with Mike Torres – WLMM

In order to keep under the 10 minute limit, and to try out WLMM a bit, I snipped out a bit in the middle where we talked about using Windows DVD Maker to create DVDs, and if you can use 3rd party dvd makers.  You can, you just have to save your movie and then load that into a dvd creator.

We’ll have more on Windows Live Movie Maker in part two.

We hope you’ve enjoyed our discussions with some of the program managers working on Windows Live, we really appreciate the opportunity to get to sit down and talk to them, and appreciate the opportunity to bring them to you.

Our last interview of the day was with Piero Sierra, Group Program Manager for Shared Data Experience.  We ended up talking for a good twenty minutes on camera, and since we try to keep these video interviews around 10 minutes or so I broke this one up in to two parts.

In part one, Piero begins with a quick definition of shared data experience (sdx), his team is responsible for SkyDrive, Windows Live Sync, and Windows Live Toolbar.  We started out talking about the differences between Live Mesh and Windows Live Sync, talked a bit about SkyDrive, and then Piero described one of his favorites, Windows Live Toolbar:

In part two, Piero talks about the uptake of the new services without getting too specific about numbers, we talked about what it means to run these services the scale of the internet, and then touched on how FolderShare has been transformed into Windows Live Sync, and some hints of what’s to come now that the move to Live ID and the inclusion into the Essentials suite has taken place.

Hopefully we’ll be able to continue our discussions with the people who bring you Windows Live, again, we really enjoyed our day of meetings, and look forward to doing it again soon.

Jeff Kunins is a Group Program Manager for Social Networking for Windows Live, working on some of the features of Windows Live that cut across what used to be separate products.  Working on Spaces and Groups, Profile, What’s New feed, and the 3rd party web activities are some of what Jeff’s group focuses on.  Jeff sees Windows Live Wave 3 as “the birth of Windows Live as a suite”, more than just a set of products with a single name.

We like how Jeff explains where we’re at with Windows Live today, that 10 years ago search was able to simplify the “cacophony” of information on the web, and now 10 years later Windows Live seeks to simplify the cacophony of the many and different social networks we find ourselves immersed in.  Good stuff.

While Omar Shahine has been kind enough to talk to us (twice) about POP3 support in Hotmail, it’s not really what he works on.  Omar has been busy down in Mountain View, California, working on Hotmail, and the People features in Windows Live Wave 3.  In the second part of our chat with him, he gives us a quick overview of the new features in Wave 3 dealing with people.  Omar explains that contacts updates are now automatically “dynamic” (before Wave 3 it required an opt in), so that when you update information in your profile the people you give permission to access that info will be kept up to date.

In the next few weeks we should be seeing some new stuff in Hotmail: POP3 access of course; web messenger, and even a few surprises.  Keep an eye out, and of course keep checking back with us here at LiveSide!