Last week, we released a Beta version of Windows Live Mail – and one of the main reasons we do that is to get some feedback from our customers on the issues they’re seeing, what they like and don’t like, what features they’d like to see, etc…  In a nutshell, we want our customers to tell us what they think!

So, if we’re going to ask you to send us feedback on our product, we had better offer you ways to do that, right?  Right – and that’s what this blog post is essentially about.  We have a few common ways to get feedback from our customers, and I wanted to take a minute to go through all those so you will know where you should go for the different types of info you might want to share with us about the latest release.

If you aren’t new to the Beta program, most of this info likely won’t be new to you.  If you are new, however, I hope the information below will be helpful to you when deciding how to send issues to the product team.

Newsgroup

This is where you should go if you want to discuss a specific issue that you’re seeing in the product with other beta testers and the product team. The product team spends a lot of time here, particularly during Beta releases, to look into the issues that you all are describing.  Please rest assured that even though you might not see a response from someone on the product team for every issue, we are looking at them and filing them away so we can do further investigation.

There are two ways to access our public newsgroup…  The first is through the web.  The second is by using Windows Live Mail as your newsreader.  Getting this setup is really simple – here are the steps you should follow:

1. Launch Windows Live Mail and click on “Newsgroups” in the lower-left corner

2. In the left pane, there is an option for “Microsoft Communities” – click on that and click on the “View Newsgroups” button.

3. search for “Windows Live Mail” and double click on the option for microsoft.public.windows.live.mail.desktop and click OK to close the dialog box

That’s it!

Support

If you’re experiencing an issue that is blocking you from using the product and you need an immediate resolution (i.e. you can’t sign in, you’re getting sync errors, etc…), you should contact our support team for help. If it’s not critical and it’s just a bug in the Beta product that you want the product team to know about, then the newsgroup is probably the better place to go for this.

Follow this link to get to our support page.  When there, fill out the form with all your details and someone from our Support team should get back to you shortly to help resolve the issue or gather more information from you if necessary.

Feedback

This is where you should go when you just want to send us your thoughts about the product as a whole, or about specific features (good/bad, I like this feature/I hate this feature, I’d like to see this in the feature/I wish you’d take this out of the feature, etc…).  You can get to the feedback site by going through our Help menu:  Help –> Send feedback…

One important thing to note about this feedback option…  The product team won’t be able to respond to you through this channel.  All of your personal information (like email, name, etc…) is stripped from your feedback so we have no way of contacting you to gather more information.  So, if you are reporting a problem that you might need help with, please use the newsgroups or support instead. 

Hope this was helpful!

Tanja – Windows Live Mail Program Manager

As we talked about yesterday, we on the Windows Live Mail team are excited about our new calendar features and hope you enjoy trying it out during our beta.  In particular, we think you’ll like that everyone who signs into Windows Live Mail with a Live ID will have their calendar synced with Windows Live Calendar. I use this feature to check my calendar when I’m at a friend’s house or traveling.

Later today, around 3 PM Pacific Time, the Windows Live Calendar service will also be adding some exciting new features. During this time, it won’t be available for access via the http://calendar.live.com website and Windows Live Mail won’t be able to sync your calendar with the service. We know it is an inconvenience to have the calendar features down so soon after releasing the beta, but there’s a good reason!  We’re doing everything we can to make the experience in both Windows Live Mail and Windows Live Calendar as great as it can possibly be.  We expect that the upgrade will be done by the end of today (again, Pacific Time).

While the upgrade is being performed, Windows Live Mail will continue to work as normal – you can still look at and edit your calendar via Windows Live Mail and any changes you make to your calendar will be saved and uploaded to the Windows Live Calendar service once the server is back up. What you will notice is a small error notification when Windows Live Mail attempts to sync with the calendar service. This also won’t affect your Hotmail or other email accounts.  The Windows Live Calendar blog will also have information about the release.

Once the new calendar service has finished its upgrade, we encourage you to try out the new Windows Live Calendar website. We think you’ll like it! Windows Live Mail will continue to work with the new calendar service just like it did before the upgrade.

Thank you for your patience while we upgrade our service!

Stephen Sisk
Program Manager, Windows Live Mail

It has been a long time since you last heard from us, hasn’t it?  Probably way too long, I know… 

But, the good news is that we’re back now and have some very exciting news to share with you today!  After lots of hard work from the Windows Live Mail team, we are so thrilled to release a new Beta which you can download today.  The team has been chugging away over the last few months and we think you’re really going to love what we have to offer.  In addition to a new Beta for Windows Live Mail, many of the applications in the Windows Live Suite are also releasing Beta installs today.  Take a look at the blog post on Windows Live Wire for more details…

I’m sure you all can’t wait to get started, and I won’t make you read this whole blog post to get the download details…because I’m just nice like that.  Click here to download the latest and greatest Windows Live Suite Beta!

Here are just a few bookkeeping details for you:

Build #: 14.0.5027.0908 (just refer to it as build 0908)

Languages:  English, Brazilian, French, German, Traditional and Simplified Chinese, Spanish, Arabic, Dutch, Danish, Finnish, Norwegian, Portuguese, Swedish, Serbian (Cyrillic and Latin), Italian, Hindi, Japanese and Korean…whew!

Upgrading:  You should be able to upgrade from Windows Live Mail v1 to this Beta.  That said, this is a Beta release so you might want to backup your data every now and again…

OK, so what’s new?

We received so much great feedback from our customers since the last release (THANK YOU!), and we’ve spent the majority of the time since our last release reviewing that feedback to help us determine what to add in the next version.  We hope you like what you see…  

Suite Installer

Outside of the sleek new design of the setup experience, you will notice that there a few brand new apps being offered for your downloading pleasure.  I’m not going to go into the details of each one of these apps right now as there are WAY too many features to point out, and this blog post would just end up being incredibly long.  Also, I will point you to a site where you can read more about each of these apps and the great features they have to offer.  You can also click on each app in the setup dialog to read a quick blurb about it…

As you can see from the image below, you can pick and choose which Windows Live apps you’d like to try out.  Of course, we highly recommend giving them all a try!

Calendar – yes, a built-in Calendar!

I can safely say that this feature was by far the most widely requested feature from our customers since we started releasing Windows Live Mail publicly…and because of that, we put lots of our team’s resources on making this feature happen.  Windows Live has a Calendar service that can be accessed through the web (i.e. through http://calendar.live.com) and now through the Windows Live Mail UI.  We’re using this service as our backend which is incredibly useful since it means that you can access your calendars and events either through the Web or Client UI.

As you can imagine, there are a number of features that are included as part of the overall calendar experience…  I’ve highlighted a few of them below, but I am not going to go into too much detail for any one of them at this time.  As the Beta goes on, we’ll keep posting to our team blog with more in-depth information about each of these features. 

Sync with Windows Live Calendar service on the web

When you first sign in to Windows Live Mail with your Windows Live ID, we will automatically import any calendars that might be associated with that account so you can see them right away in the Calendar view!

And, of course, any changes to your calendars made from either Windows Live Mail or http://calendar.live.com will sync regularly to help you keep all your events up to date.

Offline support

Just like email in Windows Live Mail, one of the major benefits of using a client calendar is that you have offline support.  So, when you need to see the details about an upcoming event, no need to worry about having internet access – all the details can be viewed while offline as well!

Birthday and holiday calendars

Adding Events

There are lots of ways to add events to your calendar – so we thought it might be useful to mention all the different options here.

Event Dialog

When you’re in Calendar view and click on the “New” button in the toolbar, you’ll get the New Event dialog. This dialog is full of options to help you make sure each event has all the info you need to get you where you need to be on time.

1) Set start and end time for an event, or you can make it an all day event which is great for those out of town excursions…

2) Choose which calendar you’re adding this event to.  The initial option will be your primary calendar – but you can change that by selecting the dropdown next to the “All day” checkbox.

3) Create a recurring event.  We’ve provided some common recurrence options, like daily, monthly, yearly, etc…, but you can also choose the “custom” option in the dropdown to create your own for those events that might have an odd schedule.

4) Set yourself a reminder – You can choose how much in advance you’d like to be reminded of an event, and then modify your account to send you reminders through email, Messenger toast or even to a mobile device – or even all 3 if that helps!

Quick Add

What’s even cooler is that you don’t have to open the event dialog to create a new event. All you need to do is select a time or date in the calendar and start typing a subject for that event. You can even drag your mouse across the times/days that the event will take place and an event will be added to your calendar that spans that timeframe – we call this feature “swipe and type”. :-)

“Add to Calendar” button

When you receive an email that has information about an event in it and you want to add it to your calendar, just click on the “Add to calendar” button in the toolbar.  This launches an event dialog - and with a few additional clicks you now have all the info you need in your calendar.

Similarly, when you have an event in your calendar that you want others to know about, you can just select that event in your calendar and click on the “Send in e-mail” button in the toolbar.  This launches a compose note with all the event details in the body so you can pass the message along to all your contacts!

Easy Event Editing (is that a tongue-twister?)

To edit an event, you can double click on it – and this will launch the event dialog again and you can modify it in any way you see fit…

OR

if all you need to do is update the time/date of an event, you can drag and drop it to the new time! Easy as pie…

Selecting calendar colors

Because we are sure you will be so excited about the calendar that you’ll be creating many to manage all your upcoming events, we wanted to make it easier for you to easily distinguish which events belong to which calendars.  So, when you create a new calendar, you can choose which color you’d like to use for those events.

Shared Calendar

Through the Windows Live Calendar service on the web, you can create a calendar that will be shared with your contacts.  This is super handy for families to keep track of everyone’s busy schedules…  Any changes made to a shared calendar through Windows Live Mail will show up on the calendars of anyone else who is subscribed to that calendar.

Contacts

We’ve also made a few updates to our Contacts view, particularly in the way we represent the online status for your Messenger contacts.  If you’re a Messenger user, you will see similar visual changes there…

New UI

First off, you’ll notice that your Messenger contacts no longer have a Messenger pawn next to them to display status information!  We’ve removed the pawns in favor of a design where the status of the contact is represented right on their user tile.  And if you’re using the list view (instead of the Tile view), the status is represented by a color and not by the Messenger pawn.

Here’s a quick rundown of what each of these colors means…

Favorites

In the contacts view, there is a new category labeled “Favorites”.  The cool thing about this category is that any contacts that you add here, either through Messenger or Mail, will show up in both locations.  So, for example, if I add someone to my Favorites category through Messenger – the next time my contacts sync in Mail, I’ll see the updates there as well.  This is a nice and easy way to quickly access the contacts that you interact with most frequently across multiple apps…

Send us feedback!

If you aren’t new to the Beta program, many of these options won’t be different from what you’ve seen in the past…  If you are new, however, here’s the quick and dirty guide to how to get feedback to the product team.  All of these options are available through the Help dropdown in Windows Live Mail.  (I’ll be doing another blog post shortly to walk through each of these in more detail…)

Newsgroup: This is where you should go if you want to discuss something that you’re seeing in the product with other beta testers and the product team. It’s great for talking about a feature or trying to see if someone else is also experiencing the same problems you are.

Feedback: This is where you should go when you just want to send us your thoughts about the product as a whole, or about specific features (good/bad, I like this feature/I hate this feature, I’d like to see this in the feature/I wish you’d take this out of the feature, etc…). The product team won’t be able to respond to you through this channel, so be aware of that.

Support: If you’re experiencing an issue that is blocking you from using the product and you need an immediate resolution (i.e. you can’t sign in, you’re getting sync errors, etc…), you should contact our support team for help. If it’s not critical and it’s just a bug in the Beta product, then the newsgroup is probably the better place to go for this.

That’s about it for now!  Can’t wait to hear what you think…so please send us feedback!

Tanja – Windows Live Mail Program Manager