It’s been just about  6 weeks since our last update.  During that time, we’ve been collecting and reviewing feedback from our customers, and working on getting some of those issues that you’ve been sending in fixed for the new Beta build that is now available on the Ideas site for you to download!

Thank you to our customers!

I first just wanted to take a moment to thank you all for sending in so much feedback about the previous builds that we’ve released.  A large portion of what I do is go through our customer feedback – and I have to say, I’m continually impressed with the level of detail and great ideas that you guys send in!  I know some of you might be wondering if we’re actually taking in all this data you’re sending to us.  Well, I want you all to rest easy and know that we really are listening.  I think you’ll see some incredible updates in this build that address a lot of the issues that you’ve been talking about over the last few weeks.

So, what’s in this new build?

Well, it’s been over a month since we released an update – and the team has been diligently working on fixing lots (and I mean, lots) of bugs!  All in all, we’ve fixed hundreds of bugs since the last build that our Beta testers received!  I think when you install this latest build, you will likely see improvements all over the product – but, as usual, there are a few areas I’d like to specifically point out so you can try them out and give them a real run for their money!

-          Account/Mail Migration

We’ve made a number of bug fixes in this area, but we’ve also added support for some scenarios which weren’t covered in previous builds.  Now when you install WLMd for the first time, we support migration of your Windows Mail accounts if you are running Windows Vista.

-          Minimize to the System Tray (round 2)

Ok, ok…so we know this feature wasn’t perfect in the last build.  We got a lot of feedback on it, and this latest build contains fixes for a lot of the issues you all reported – so give it another shot and let us know if you continue to see problems with the feature.

-          Search updates

The Windows Desktop Search team recently shipped v3.0 of their product, and we made some changes in WLMd to make sure we integrate well with their latest version.  If you’re running Windows XP SP2, please go and download Desktop Search 3.0 and give the Search feature in WLMd a whirl!

-          Message list updates

Two of the biggest customer requests for the Message List were to (a) provide the ability to sort messages by size and (b) give customers a one-line view option so you can have better sorting capabilities.  I’m happy to report that both of these options are now available in this build!  Enjoy!

-          Windows Live Spaces “Friends” Integration

Windows Live Spaces has a “Friends” feature – and for those of you haven’t tried this feature out, you really should!  It’s a very cool way of tagging and keeping in touch with not only your Friends, but also to explore the sites of your Friends’ Friends and build a broader social network.  We wanted to integrate with this feature in WLMd, so now in the Contacts area you will see a link to “Go to your friends list” which launches a new browser window that takes you directly to your Friends list!  Intuitive, right? ;-)

-          General Bug Fix Areas - There are a few other areas where we made a number of general bug fixes, and we’d like to just point them out to you so you can let us know if you think more improvements could still be made…

·         Synchronization – I know a lot of people were running into syncing problems, getting errors and such, and we’ve spent lots of time trying to resolve those – so please just keep an eye on this and let us know if you continue to see issues while sync’ing your mail/contacts/RSS feeds/etc…

·         Performance – This is one area where we made a lot of improvements with the last build, and will continue to work on until we feel like we’ve got it right!  Again, hard to pinpoint a specific thing to focus on – but if you think certain tasks are still slower than you would expect them to be, please let us know what those are so we can make sure to investigate those for future releases.

Have fun! :-)

--tanja