Your inbox is very personal. It’s your communications, your business, and your archives. The email you send is clearly very personal too – and it should truly be yours.

When designing the new Hotmail, we focused on helping people get the clutter out of their inboxes so that they can find important messages fast and be more productive. To do this, we added tools to help people manage the email they receive. For example, the Sweep menu lets you quickly delete or move all email from a particular sender. We also improved the filters and created a way to bring all related email messages together in a conversation view. We even took a hard look into our own practices and asked ourselves: What could we change to better respect our customers’ inboxes?

In asking ourselves this question, we made two significant changes with the new Hotmail: 1) We’re removing the text at the bottom of messages sent from Hotmail, and 2) We’re focused on only sending marketing email that you want.

Removing text from the bottom of messages sent from Hotmail

We’ve seen a lot of feedback regarding the text that gets added to the bottom of email messages sent from Hotmail and some other email providers. In the image above, you can see an example of this text, “Hotmail goes with you. Get it on your BlackBerry or iPhone.”  We call this text a tagline, and we’d like to address this pretty simply – we’re getting rid of it.

When Hotmail first started in the mid-90s, taglines helped people to discover our then revolutionary new type of personal email service … free web-based email. At the time, most people had an address tied to an ISP like an AOL, CompuServe, or Prodigy email, and taglines were an efficient way to let people know about Hotmail. As Hotmail evolved over the years, so did taglines, taking on the additional role of educating people about new features & services in Hotmail and other related products. They proved to be effective, with nearly 2 million taglines clicked per month. 

But alas, most people don’t really like taglines in their email. Email is personal, and taglines can distract from your message, or make it look less professional. While taglines did drive awareness and clicks, we respect your inbox, and we are taking them out in the upcoming Hotmail release.

Improving our email communications

Email is one of the most popular ways for businesses to educate, engage, and deepen loyalty with their customers; in fact, it’s the communication method that most people prefer when interacting with businesses. However, it’s also a channel that is easily overused, causing frustration when someone’s inbox becomes full of unwanted email. Hotmail recognizes this, and while we’re adding tools to help you easily manage the email you receive, we’re also making sure that the messages we send are desired and relevant, not adding to the problem.

With our next release, we’re focusing our attention on improving our email communications to be best-of-breed like our new Hotmail. We are implementing two changes in our email communications in the US:

• Don’t open our email? We’ll stop sending it. If you aren’t engaging with our email, our goal is to stop sending it to you, except in the cases of critical account updates or service notifications where we don’t want you to be surprised. We’re also making our opt-out options more prominent.
• More relevant email. Targeted email improves your experience by keeping you up-to- date on the upgrades, changes, products, and services you use. So we’re improving the relevancy of the email we send by taking into account which services you’re using and what you have or haven’t clicked in the past.

A key part of the new Hotmail is respecting our customers’ best interests and personal inboxes. This is reflected in our investments and decisions about how we communicate.

If you've been following us closely, you know we've had two different synchronization services: Windows Live Sync and Live Mesh beta.  We’ve heard two things loud and clear.  First, people who use either Sync or Mesh rely on the services every day to connect them back to their PCs and sync their important files across multiple PCs.  And second, people want to know why we have two such similar services, and how they connect to Windows Live and SkyDrive.  So, we’ve focused on making Sync a great application for people that use multiple PCs – and making SkyDrive a great service for sharing documents and photos on the web.  Here are a few highlights of the new offering.

• Access to your PC from anywhere – Many people used the remote desktop feature in Live Mesh to access files or apps from a main PC that they left online.  Similarly, people used the previous version of Sync to browse to files on their main PC remotely over the web. We’ve standardized on one solution for remote desktop access in the new Sync. We’ve kept it simple and easy to set up, but made it faster and more responsive by adding data centers and optimizing our protocols. We’ve also improved support for multiple monitors, and added zoom.
• All your stuff on all the PCs you use regularly – With all of the new types of PCs available, we saw more people adding 2^nd or 3^rd PCs and wanting all their files in sync across PCs. With the new Sync, we’ve focused on making this very simple. Now in a few clicks you can sync Windows folders like Documents, Photos, Music, and Videos across all your PCs.  To do this, we invested heavily in peer-to-peer synchronization so you don’t have to worry about cloud storage limits.  For example, the new Sync beta intelligently chooses the right connection (internet or your local network) to sync files between different computers. We also increased key sync limits, with support for more sync folders, many more files in each folder, and the ability to synchronize files as large as 40GB now. 
• Your most important desktop stuff synced to the cloud – Mesh users told us they liked having files they worked with every day constantly synced to the cloud, so that they could access them anywhere – even if the originating PC was off.  We also learned that they were using the cloud to sync personal files across machines. So, we focused on making cloud synchronization more reliable. We made sure we were providing enough cloud storage to sync a really important folder to the cloud. Although more is always better, we found that 2GB of cloud storage was enough for most of the common cases, while keeping our costs at a level that we could afford to run the service for free. Of course, you can always give other people permission to access any of your Sync folders if, for example, you want to share large picture collections or personal videos with your family.
• Simple document collaboration over the web – You told us it took too much coaching to get others to use Mesh or Sync for sharing with you. You often spent time managing file conflicts because people were online at different times. That’s why we introduced the all new Office Web Apps in SkyDrive. With co-authoring and files that live in the cloud, Office Web Apps avoid most cases where edits collide, simplifying the experience for everyone.  We also brought the social “news feed” from Mesh into SkyDrive.  And all of this is web-based, so it’s easy for anyone to participate. We also saw that many people used Mesh to share OneNote notebooks across PCs. So we worked with the Office team to make OneNote 2010 sync to your SkyDrive right out of the box. 

If you're trying out Windows Live Sync for the first time, you can find out more from our Windows Live Sync preview page and then download the upcoming beta.  Note that, like other products in the new Windows Live Essentials beta, the new Sync beta requires Windows Vista or Windows 7 for PCs running Windows, and requires Leopard or higher for Mac.

If you're using Live Mesh or Windows Live Sync already, you’ll have to uninstall the previous version before you start using the new beta version – we’ve written up a quick FAQ to help you get started.  We know there are things you love about each product, and we understand it might take some time to get used to the changes.  But we think that, as you use the new Sync beta together with Windows and Windows Live, you’ll soon find it a familiar experience. 

Thanks for all the great feedback you’ve provided us on Live Mesh beta and Windows Live Sync. We look forward to your comments on the new Windows Live Sync beta and to making future innovations to the Sync experience. To learn more about Sync, visit the Windows Live Sync preview page, and then give it a try as soon as the new Sync beta is available.

David Treadwell
Vice President, Windows Live

Over the last few months, we've gotten incredible feedback from the hundreds of thousands of users in our Office Web Apps Technical Preview.  We’ve been busy incorporating much of that feedback, and today, Office Web Apps on SkyDrive are now available to everyone in the US, UK, Canada, and Ireland. We’ll have more to share next week when Office 2010 is released to consumers, including how Office 2010 + SkyDrive + Office Web Apps give you the best productivity experience across the PC, phone, and browser.

In the meantime, if you live in the US, UK, Canada, or Ireland, you can head over to Office.live.com today to start viewing and editing Word, PowerPoint, Excel, and OneNote documents right in your web browser – and share them with your friends.

If you don’t live in one of those regions, you can still get access – just click here. You might not get the Web Apps in your favorite language yet, as we are still rolling out updates to different regions. Note that people you share documents with may also need to visit the link above before they can access the documents you share with them.

A few weeks ago, I blogged about what our team has been working on, and since then, we’ve been busy adding a little more polish, so we could present them to you today.

Let’s get started

There are so many new things for you to explore that trying to cover them all in a single blog post would be like trying to gift wrap the Space Needle. Still, there are quite a few great features for you to try out right away.

• Upload your docs. Go to Office.live.com and upload a doc (or lots of docs). If you have Silverlight (install it here), you’ll get an extra bonus: the ability to upload many more files at once, simply by dragging and dropping them all in your favorite browser. Don’t have a doc to upload? No problem, you can create Word, PowerPoint, Excel, and OneNote docs right in the browser.
  
              Drag files from your desktop directly into the browser
  
• Edit a doc right in your browser. On Office.live.com, you’ll notice that all the files you’ve recently viewed or edited—or your friends have shared with you—show up right in the “Recent documents” section so they’re easy to find.
  
                 The Office page on SkyDrive 
  Click Edit in browser, and start working away in the Web Apps without having to install any special software. If you need a feature (like 3D charts, for example) from Office on your PC, it’s really easy to open your document on your PC with little interruption.
  
               Editing a Word doc in my browser
• Work together in real time. Sometimes two brains (or ten brains) are better than one. Like when you’re updating a party invitation list in Excel, or planning a group trip using OneNote. With co-authoring in Excel and OneNote Web Apps, you can work with your friends at the same time and never be locked out of a document when someone else is working on it.
• Read your docs on your smartphone. Browse to Office.live.com  on your phone and you’ll be able to view Word and PowerPoint documents without any extra software (on most smartphones).
  
            Viewing a PowerPoint slide on my mobile phone
• And lots more. Across the board, we’ve worked to give you a smoother experience sharing and collaborating with others, with features such as sending and receiving instant messages using Messenger on the web, whether or not you have Messenger installed on your computer. To make sure you can share without worries, we’ve built in features like version history, which allows you to go back to older edits of your documents, and enhanced search, which lets you search across all your documents and those shared with you by others. Plus, when you’re done sharing, you can print your Word and PowerPoint documents right from the browser.
  
  Chatting in Messenger on the web while editing an Excel workbook using Office Web Apps

There's more – but you probably want to just try it yourself. Get going!

There’s more to come

You might be asking, when do I get access to all the cool Office features in Hotmail that were announced recently? We’ll have more to share on the new Hotmail updates very soon.

And of course, you get even more cool features  when you combine Office Web Apps with Office 2010, for example, enabling you to edit offline,  and to co-author documents using revision marks, comments, and other rich features in Word and PowerPoint. You can learn more about Office 2010 here.

That’s it for now!

Jason Moore
Principal Lead Program Manager, Windows Live SkyDrive

In recent posts we’ve talked about the new Messenger and the re-invention of Hotmail. Today, we’re going to spend time on the new Windows Live Essentials.

You can also view this video on YouTube

Windows Live Essentials – the essential software for Windows

Windows Live Essentials includes Messenger, Mail, Photo Gallery, Movie Maker, Writer, Sync and Family Safety. Essentials is available for free and in many cases may already be installed on your PC with Windows. If not, you can get it from http://download.live.com.

In the upcoming release, we focused on achieving  two important goals with Essentials:

1. Making everyday tasks simpler and enabling new possibilities on your PC
2. Connecting Windows 7 to the cloud

Making everyday tasks simpler and enabling new possibilities

Windows 7 has set a new benchmark for PC simplicity and reliability. More than any previous version, Windows 7 saves you time and helps you get more done. With this release, we wanted Windows Live to help you save even more time with the top things you do on your PC. So we designed Essentials to help you communicate and stay in touch with the people you care about, and to help you easily organize, polish, and share your photos and movies.

Windows 7 also allows us to unleash a new set of possibilities that weren’t available before. We’re taking advantage of GPU-accelerated graphics and animations, using the new Windows 7 "ribbon" user interface, integrating jumplists into the Windows 7 taskbar, and much more to provide you with a great experience.

Connecting Windows 7 to the cloud

Today, most cloud services are accessed through a browser, which is easy and convenient, especially when you’re away from your PC. But there are advantages to connecting to the cloud directly through rich client applications on your PC. Namely, you have a powerful hub that connects to your devices in a way that maintains the privacy and security of your data. This affords a much richer experience while maintaining the convenience of the browser.

This belief informed our goal of connecting Windows 7 to the cloud with Windows Live Essentials. This means your Windows experience natively connects to the services you already use – not just the ones from Microsoft. The new Windows Live Photo Gallery, Movie Maker, Mail, and Messenger connect to photo and video sharing (SkyDrive, Flickr, YouTube, Facebook, SmugMug), social networking (Facebook, MySpace, LinkedIn), email (Hotmail, GMail, Yahoo! Mail), blogging (Spaces, WordPress, Blogger), and document productivity (Office Web Apps) services.

And with the new Windows Live Sync, Windows keeps your files synchronized on the web and across multiple PCs. You can also directly access your PC over the web with the new remote desktop feature.

There’s a lot coming with the new Windows Live Essentials. We’ll cover this over a series of posts. For now, let’s focus on the new Windows Live Photo Gallery.

The new Windows Live Photo Gallery

From a million and one photos, to one-in-a-million

The new release of Windows Live Photo Gallery uses the power of your PC to comb through your million and one photos to find that one-in-a-million. All so that you can share your memories with those you care most about using the services you already use. We focused on making your photos easy to organize, find, fix and share regardless of whether you use social networks, email or photo sharing sites like Flickr.

     The new Photo Gallery

Organize your photos effortlessly

We all take a lot of photos and videos that we love to share. Increasingly, those pictures and videos are taken using our mobile phones. In the US, 10 billion more photos will be taken in 2010 than in 2007— rising to nearly 57 billion this year.

With this in mind, the new Photo Gallery was designed with easy tools for finding the photos and videos you care about most. You can use the new Windows 7 ribbon interface to quickly narrow down photos by date taken, rating, tag (including geo-tag) or any combination you choose.

Of course the best way to search for photos is by people. In the new Photo Gallery, we are introducing new facial recognition technology that quickly organizes and finds photos according to the people in them. As you tag people in your photos, Photo Gallery learns what each person looks like and automatically suggests additional photos that they are in.

   Windows Live Photo Gallery recognizes the faces of people you've tagged

Getting your photos ready to share

Photo Gallery makes it fun and easy to turn ordinary photos into extraordinary ones.

• Auto Adjust looks deep into each picture and finds ways to fine-tune the exposure, color balance, angle, and sharpness to make it better in one click.
• Retouch helps you remove unfortunate blemishes quickly. Should you want to (we won’t tell), you can even remove entire people from photos!
• Batch editing lets you make the same edit to several photos at once.
• Last, but certainly not least, we’re introducing Photo Fuse. Have you ever taken a group photo where someone’s eyes were closed? Using cutting-edge technology from Microsoft Research, Photo Fuse makes it possible to take the best parts of similar photos and fuse them together into the one perfect shot.

        Photo Fuse lets you choose the best parts of each photo

Share right from Photo Gallery

Ok, now you have ten perfect pictures you want to share. Photo Gallery makes it easy to share them any way you want. You can post to your social networks or photo sites, create a movie, or send them as beautiful photo email messages.

      One-click sharing from the ribbon in Photo Gallery

Share directly to your social networks. Here’s how easy this is – just select the photos and videos you want to share, click the service you want in the ribbon, and we’ll publish them for you. We’ve also worked with our partners to support tagging, so that when you publish a photo to Facebook, for example, the people tags go with it. And if someone else adds a tag once the photo is on Facebook, we’ll bring that tag back into your collection in Photo Gallery.

Send beautiful photo email messages. Social networks get all the headlines, but email remains the most convenient way to share photos. Yet photos and video file sizes can be huge, especially if you want to share more than a few images. So we’ve connected Photo Gallery to Windows Live Mail and Windows Live SkyDrive to make this easy. With one click we’ll take your photos from Photo Gallery into Windows Live Mail and apply a beautiful photo album template. You can send the album to anyone, regardless of email service or size of inbox. The photos are stored on SkyDrive for you, where your email recipients automatically have permission to view them. You can also use SkyDrive to send movies without clogging your inbox (of your friend’s inbox).

        Apply one of several beautiful album templates to your photo email

Make a movie in a few clicks. Want to really bring a tear to someone’s eye? Take your photos and make a movie in a few clicks with the new Windows Live Movie Maker, which includes beautiful new transitions and rich visual effects that help you create movie magic. (More on this in an upcoming blog post!)

You can even share your slide show while you’re watching it! Just choose some photos in Photo Gallery and click “Slide show.” Right there, Photo Gallery hits you with a beautiful full-screen animated slide show, complete with movie-style themes. This is actually all powered by Movie Maker, so with one click you can take your slide show and publish it as a movie to YouTube, SkyDrive, or Facebook. Or if you want to get really creative, you can launch Movie Maker and take full control.

 
       Full-screen slide shows that you can share online

Get ready – it’s all coming your way soon!

We’re excited about the new Essentials and how we’re bringing together the power of the PC and the cloud. Stay tuned for more on this, including upcoming posts on the new Windows Live Movie Maker, Mail, Writer, Sync, and Family Safety.

We’ll begin broader beta testing of the new Essentials in a few weeks. Meanwhile you can learn more at http://www.windowslivepreview.com.

Brad Weed & Piero Sierra 
Group Program Managers, Windows Live Essentials

We were excited to share with you last week a preview of the brand new Hotmail, available starting later this summer. To follow up, we wanted to share a little more detail around some of the security investments we’ve made in the new Hotmail.

Security remains the number one concern of people who use email and a top priority for all Microsoft development efforts, products, and services – Hotmail included.

Among the several security enhancements we made in the new Hotmail, here are a few in particular that we’d like to call out.

Account recovery

The new security platform elements we've built up around Hotmail now enable you to use your cell phone or other items as proof of account ownership. For example, if you lose your password, or, worse, if your account gets compromised, we can now send you an account recapture code via SMS to regain access to your account.

Single-use codes

This new security feature is designed to further protect you when you sign in from a public computer, such as those found in internet cafés, airports, and coffee shops. When you request a single-use code, the code is sent via SMS to the phone number associated with your Windows Live ID. It acts as a one-time substitute for your password. By using a single-use code, you won't have to type your password into a public computer, thereby helping to prevent it from being stolen by key loggers and the like.

Request a single-use code…	…then use the code to sign in to Hotmail

Full-session SSL

In addition to providing SSL encryption at login for all accounts, the new Hotmail will soon support the option to maintain SSL encryption between you and our servers during your entire Hotmail session.

Trusted senders

Hotmail will help you to visually identify trusted senders in your inbox, particularly banks and other institutions commonly used for phishing scams. We put safety logos next to only those senders that we recognize as legitimate so that you can more easily spot malicious imitators.

John Scarrow
General Manager - Safety Services