Microsoft have for a while now developed a brand they call Windows Live. Windows Live is Microsoft’s wave of online services and connected consumer software.
If you’re an existing user of MSN Messenger/Windows Messenger, you’d probably already noticed that it has been rebranded into Windows Live Messenger. For those of you still using version 8.1, I suggest launching the new Windows Live Installer package and get 8.5 beta which is a very nice upgrade.
So why am I mentioning Windows Live today?
Reason for this is that all their tools have recently been updated and there is new services available. Everything is now more unified and as I just mentioned, available from a single unified installer package.
Windows Live SkyDrive
Great new service that allows you to store your documents and photos online. Files can be private, shared with friends or made public available to anyone. This is very useful for distributing large files that you don’t want to send over e-mails.
With shared folders, you can give your friends permissions to contribute so you can have collections of documents or photos that is uploaded by you and your friends.
Windows Live Photo Gallery
If you’ve upgraded to Windows Vista, you might have seen the new Windows Photo Gallery which is an awesome tool to organize, tag and manage thousands of digital photos. While the out-of-box features for Photo Gallery was limited, it has now been upgraded and branded under the Windows Live logo. When you install this new tool, the existing Windows Photo Gallery in Windows Vista disappears from your Start menu.
What’s more existing, is the availability of Photo Gallery on Windows XP!
New features includes direct upload to Live Spaces, easier to add captions and titles, create a single panorama from multiple photos, resizing is available directly from the list view. The resize can be done on multiple files at the same time.
Windows Live Writer
Updated with new features, including ability to embed videos easily from Soapbox by MSN video. I am currently writing this blog post using Windows Live Writer. If you have a blog or Live Space, I suggest you try it out as it’s an awesome tool for content authoring and supports most blog systems.
Windows Live Mail
While Hotmail web interface has been greatly improved the last few months, it’s still running a bit slow on low-end machines. It’s very resource heavy on the browser and uses lots of JavaScripts. So instead of relying on the browser to view your Hotmail e-mails, you can now use the rich Windows Live Mail client.
Windows Live Mail have good integration with Hotmail, and supports other third party e-mail accounts and NNTP (News) services.
Windows Live Contacts
Together with the Windows Live Mail, you get an rich client to view and manage all your Live contacts. I’m glad they made this tool as it’s much faster and enjoyable organizing your contacts from this tool than the web interface on Hotmail or from Live Messenger.
Windows Live Search for Mobile
While making rich web and windows based services on the Live platform, Microsoft is ensuring that you can access these great services from your mobile devices. By downloading a small application for your Windows Mobile based device, you can search things like streets, restaurants, cinemas and more. You can watch maps and even satellite images from the places you are traveling. One of the new features is up-to-date traffic information (US-only).
http://mobile.search.live.com/about/
Notes
While this is only a small sample of the available Live services, I hope it was useful for some of you and maybe you didn’t realize that all of these was available.
Remember that most of the rich clients that runs on Windows have good support for Export and Import, which is functionality you don’t get on the web. It’s nice being able to export all your contacts and have a local backup in case of emergency, the same applies to all your important Hotmail e-mails.
The Live services space is an area that is very agile and changes happens weekly so instead of putting out lots of direct links which might not work, I suggest stopping by one of the main sites and start playing around with the services.
Released services:
Beta services: