Microsoft recently sent a letter to all MSN Groups users and managers to let them know that MSN Groups will be closing down soon, and that they can move their groups to Multiply.

If you are an MSN Groups user, you’ll need to move your group to the Multiply service by February 21, 2009.

You may have received the letter or seen an announcement about this change mentioned in the blogosphere. We’d like to tell you more about some of the most frequent questions we’ve heard about this change. For more details, you can also visit the MSN Groups Resource Center.

Why are you closing MSN Groups?

It is our goal to always provide the most current and user-friendly technology to our users, and over the past few years we’ve received feedback from users that MSN Groups falls short of that goal. At the same time, we have been making huge investments in the Windows Live suite of services. In the long term, we believe that closing MSN Groups is the best way to enable us to offer great group experiences that help our customers stay in touch with the people they care about. We have been building a brand new service for groups on Windows Live, building it from the ground up to provide great value for our customers.

Since the new Windows Live Groups service (coming soon!) is being built with an eye to the future, we weren’t able to retrofit it to use the data contained in MSN Groups. However, it is very important to us that our users can keep the data they created using MSN Groups and can continue to enjoy those experiences. So we have partnered with Multiply to provide MSN Groups users with a way to keep their groups going into the future on Multiply.

Why Multiply?

Multiply is an online group and media sharing service that PCWorld recently called one of the ten most underrated tech products. Multiply has worked diligently with us to understand all the ways our customers use MSN Groups, and has prepared its service to receive and host MSN Groups and their data. Multiply prepared a special opt-in migration method that puts group managers in control of moving a group to Multiply and inviting members to rejoin the group in its new location.

Why not allow current MSN Groups to migrate to Windows Live Groups?

Our upcoming groups service on Windows Live will have a different focus from MSN Groups. The first version of the new Windows Live Groups service will be optimized for small groups like clubs or families, whereas MSN Groups caters to a wide variety of group sizes and types, including large public groups. Because the two services differ in their intent and feature set, a direct migration from MSN Groups to Windows Live Groups wasn’t possible. Multiply offers a similar set of features to MSN Groups and therefore can more effectively receive all of the MSN Groups data at this time.

Where can I learn more?

If you have other questions, visit the MSN Groups Resource Center at any time for the most up-to-date answers to common questions, information about migrating a group to Multiply, contact information for our support staff, and important dates.

Update 2/20/09: We've extended MSN Groups for a couple more days. If you are an MSN Groups user, you’ll need to move your group to the Multiply service before Monday, February 23, 2009. On February 23 we will close MSN Groups and you will no longer be able to access your group or any of the data in it. For more infor, see "Closing MSN Groups."

[Update, Nov. 7, 2008] Thanks for your thoughtful comments and questions! We ARE listening, and we've posted answers to many of your questions here.

Hey, there! I’m Dick Craddock, Group Program Manager for Hotmail.

As we roll out the newest release of Windows Live Hotmail, I want to talk a bit about what kind of performance improvements we’ve made, and how we made them.

I also want to talk about our decision to combine the old “Classic” and “Full” versions of Hotmail into a single experience that we think will work extremely well for all our users.

First things first – we’re fast

No kidding – we’re fast! We made the new Hotmail much, much faster than the old “Full” experience. The “Classic” experience was already lightening fast, but we made the new Hotmail a wee bit quicker even than that! Compared to the old “Full” experience, loading a new messages is about twice as fast. It’s faster to sign in, too. In fact, we picked out the most common things your do on Hotmail and made them all faster. The following chart compares four common tasks and how long each one takes when you do it for the very first time in both the old and new versions of Hotmail. The times shown in the chart are the average page load times across a lot of different environments and are normalized. Shorter bars are better!

But wait! It gets better! Your browser actually caches (saves) a bunch of stuff that Hotmail uses (images, code, etc.). So, it turns out that each of these goes even faster after the first time you do it.

The second chart shows a comparison of the same tasks after you’ve done them at least once (for instance, reading a second message; or signing out, then signing back in). We made getting to your inbox and reading messages smokin’ fast!

Merging “Classic” and “Full”

In our last release of Hotmail we actually had two different versions. “Classic” was aimed at people who wanted a lightweight experience that looked a lot like, well, classic Hotmail! “Full” (or “Rich” as we sometimes call it) was aimed at people who wanted the whole kitchen sink – every feature we could think of. “Full” was most useful for folks with very fast Internet connections, since all those features take time to load in the browser.

When we started developing this new release, we asked ourselves an interesting question: What if we built a single user experience that starts out clean and simple, but lets people turn on new features when they want them?

The experience would have to feel familiar to our “Classic” users.

It would have to feel powerful to our “Full” users.

It would have to be easy for all our users to discover new features.

And it would have to be fast. Really fast.

How did we do that?

First, we decided that most of the “Full” features could simply be options that users can turn on whenever they want. For example, the reading pane (one of my favorite features) is turned off by default.

But using the Options menu, you can display the reading pane on the right or the bottom of the Hotmail window. Users coming from “Classic” will automatically have the reading pane turned off, while “Full” users will retain their reading pane setting from the previous version of Hotmail. 

We also decided to make a whole bunch of improvements to the Contacts pages. “Classic” and “Full” users will both find lots of new features here. For instance, when you click a contact to view their details, along with the usual stuff like e-mail address, phone numbers, and whatever other info you entered about that person, you’ll also see other useful information about them, like recent messages you’ve exchanged with them, or (if you have their address) a link to a map of that address. You can even send a contact a quick e-mail message without leaving the page!

The page you use to compose a new message was quite a challenge. We love the auto-complete feature from “Full” and we love the favorites pane from “Classic.” In the new release, we figured out how to get the best of both worlds.

To use auto-complete, just start typing the name of one of your contacts in the To: line, and Hotmail automatically starts filling in matches from your contact list. Try it! On the other hand, if you want to quickly get to your favorite contacts, you can still bring them up easily by clicking the To: button, and then clicking the Favorites tab. 

But how did we keep it fast?

In the old days, it was pretty easy to make a website fast. In Web 1.0 it was all about “page weight” – that is, the sheer number of characters that had to fly across the Internet from our server to your browser. Every click brought in a new page, and most people had fairly slow connections. So we spent a ton of time making the page as “light” as possible.

You might ask, “What’s the problem?” Well, the problem was that we wanted to add a bunch of cool new features that were going to make the page “heavier.”

Enter AJAX… and lots of performance tuning

The great advance of the Web 2.0 world was a cool thing called AJAX. “AJAX” just refers to the technologies that can be used to make websites more interactive. Using AJAX means that you don’t have to go fetch a whole new page with every click; instead, you just go fetch the parts of the page that need to be updated. That’s better (and faster) because, typically, most of the page hasn’t changed.

For instance, in Hotmail when you use the reading pane and you click a message in the message list, we just go fetch that new message and pop it into the reading pane instead of downloading a whole new page. Most of the page – the header, the folders, the message list – hasn’t changed at all, so we don’t bother to fetch that stuff again.

Our team spent a lot of time optimizing the Hotmail experience to make it as fast as possible. We used all kinds of techniques – everything from tweaking arcane server settings, to doing aggressive edge-caching, to delaying the download of parts of the user interface until you need them. We’ve learned all the ins-and-outs of Internet Explorer, Firefox, and Safari, and how to get the most out of them. We’ve learned a great deal about the world’s networking infrastructure and how to best take advantage of it. And we’re measuring our real-world performance all over the globe to make sure we understand the experience that our users are actually getting when they use Hotmail, no matter where they are.

We think improving download speed is some of the most important work we do. We hope you agree! And we hope you like the new user experience, whether you’re coming from “Classic” or “Full.”

Enjoy!

- Dick Craddock, Group Program Manager for Hotmail

[Update, November 7, 2008]: Thanks for your thoughtful comments and questions! We ARE listening, and we've posted answers to many of your questions here.

[Update, November 25, 2008:] Check out this recent blog post for updates about the bug fixes we're making in repsonse to your comments.

Technorati Tags: clubhouse,Windows+Live,Hotmail,updates,story

Technorati Tags: Windows+Live,Hotmail,updates,performance

Hey. I'm Eric Doerr and I lead the Program Management team for Digital Memories (which is our geeky way of saying anything related to Photos or Video in Windows Live).

Some of you have noticed that we introduced a new Windows Live Movie Maker product a few weeks ago as one of the betas in the latest version of the Windows Live suite of PC applications. We've been pretty quiet about this product, so you might ask "where have we been and what have we been doing?" And you might wonder, "Where are all the features?" The answers to these two questions are "working very hard," and "coming soon."

A little bit of history

Back when we introduced the first version of Windows Movie Maker (waay back in 2000, when we were all still shooting with Super 8 film and had darkrooms in our basements), who would have guessed how fast the imaging space would become accessible to the mainstream consumer? And the Internet! Who knew how dramatically it would change how we connect with our friends and family and the world?

A few years ago, we started Windows Live and took a hard look at our consumer products. Movie Maker was an established product with millions of regular users. But looking forward, we knew we had problems. The core of the product hadn't been designed with today's hardware in mind, and getting it to scale to new technologies like HD video was difficult. Although the Windows Vista version of Movie Maker brought significant improvements to performance and stability, we still heard power users give advice like "save your work often." And we also knew that although the product could do amazing things, most users barely scratched the surface of its features. Finally, our customer test showed that too many people were intimidated by the product and had a hard time getting started.

Clearly, we had to solve these problems in a sustainable way that also gave us the flexibility to respond quickly to evolving scenarios. After a lot of investigation, we decided to start fresh. We were inspired by the video-sharing solutions that were starting to spring up, and we were intrigued by the rapid advancements in graphics hardware, especially the increasingly capable GPUs on the latest video cards. And we were impressed with the results realized by Microsoft Office 2007 and the new "ribbon" user interface model.

Building a new engine

The first thing we did is build a new engine (did I mention we're geeks?) to handle more photo and video formats, bigger file sizes, and the ever-increasing mountain of photos and videos captured every day. (I thought I shot a lot of photos and videos until a coworker returned from a 3-week vacation and had taken 24,000 photos and hundreds of video clips!) We built an engine designed to scale to everything happening today, and everything we could imagine throwing at it in the future. If the old Windows Movie Maker engine was a dependable propeller plane, the new Windows Live Movie Maker is more like a jet engine.

In the current beta, you can't see much of that power, but I want to let you know that it's coming. You'll see lots of cool things become possible that you just couldn't do in Windows Movie Maker (or any other consumer product, for that matter). We're not ready to share a lot of details, but I'll give you one hint: he old Movie Maker engine was 2D. Let's just say that the new engine is better than that.

Rethinking the interface

Once we got the engine underway, we started digging in to the user interface (UI). We knew from user research and customer visits that most people didn't have the time, energy or willpower to spend hours putting together home movies. In our user segmentation, we call these users "normal humans" and the other users "people who understand what I mean when I say that it's not looking good for the character in the redshirt.*" So we started building an interface focused on the core things normal humans do. Things like having 5 minutes to spare and wanting to share a set of photos and videos from a birthday party/soccer game/night on the town with mom/family/friends. Over time, we plan to add more features that will let some customers spend more time being creative, but we will always focus on having the primary scenarios that most customers want complete in just a few clicks.

After a bunch of experimentation, we found that the "ribbon" UI paradigm worked well for the problems we were trying to solve. One way to look at this is that Office invented the "ribbon" to surface the 20 percent that people use 80 percent of the time, leaving the complicated stuff hidden until you need it. With Windows Live Movie Maker, we started by building the 20%, and we're working really hard to add the other 80 percent now. (Trust me, we're good at adding the more complicated bits.)

As an example, here's the same movie in both versions:

This is Windows Movie Maker. Does it look complicated enough for you?

This is Windows Live Movie Maker. It's way simpler.

Big changes:

• We got rid of the project workspace, the short-term parking area where for files, which you then had to drag to the storyboard or timeline.

• You always have a movie in the Movie Maker. When you open files, they are automatically in your movie. You can instantly publish or save and be done.

• We moved all the tasks to the ribbon area, instead of them being scattered on the top and side.

• We got rid of the timeline. For all its power, having common tasks (like adding a soundtrack) forced a switch from the relatively approachable storyboard to the somewhat scary timeline, which was a problem.

Number of clicks aren't everything, but just for reference, to create the movie above takes 6 clicks in Windows Live Movie Maker (add 3 if you want to publish to the web) and 11 clicks in Windows Movie Maker (and would take dozens more to publish to the web).

Embracing the web

Meanwhile, the Windows Live Photo Gallery folks had been working on a plug-in SDK for sharing video and photos. We think the lines between photos and video are blurring fast, and we know that our customers use lots of different sharing services, and we think that's cool, too. So, we decided to make the plug-in platform support photos and video and use it in both the Photo Gallery and Movie Maker. We're providing one plug-in for Movie Maker (to Soapbox on MSN Video), but we expect to see most of the sharing sites supported fairly quickly.

This is the first glimpse you'll get of the new Windows Live Movie Maker. It's an earlier product version, compared with the rest of the Windows Live betas, so you'll probably see the beta tag stick around a while longer. Of course we'll keep you posted as we roll out more features. We're just getting started. Stay tuned.

— Eric Doerr, PM, Movies and Photos

* I was inspired by Paul Thurrott's recent post on the beta and couldn't resist the redshirt reference. Learn what a redshirt is

UPDATE: For more info, please see our more recent blog post about Windows Live Movie Maker beta:
http://windowslivewire.spaces.live.com/blog/cns!2F7EB29B42641D59!35518.entry

The bloggers around here have been busy lately, if you haven’t noticed! Here are a few recent posts on other Windows Live blogs that you might be interested in:

• Photo Gallery - John from the Photo Gallery team tells you how (and why) you can tag people in your photos using Windows Live Photo Gallery beta. Photo Gallery makes this even easier by automatically recognizing all the faces in your photos, so that you can quickly label who is in them, and find all the pictures of those people later.
• Messenger – Tolga on the Messenger team tells us all about the new and improved voice and video calling features in Windows Live Messenger beta. Yep, you can actually make video calls – for free!
• Mail – Stacia blogs about the new calendar in Windows Live Mail beta, and how it works together with your web calendar on Windows Live. Not only that, but you can even import iCal calendars from other websites, share a calendar, and set up reminders for upcoming appointments.

Check out the new betas yourself, and let us know what you think!

- Antonia

We’re rolling out the newest release of Hotmail as we speak. Slow rollouts are typical for large web services, both at Microsoft and other companies. We’re going to blog more about our slow rollouts and how they maximize the stability of the site in another post. Our Hotmail team blog readers know that we always roll out major updates slowly so that if any issues pop up, we can catch them early before they affect everybody.

Thanks so much to all of our observant Hotmail customers who have seen our latest version and added their constructive comments. The more you can tell us about the issues you are having, the easier it is for us to understand and fix them quickly. Here are some of the issues we’ve heard about, along with what you should try if you’re having the problem, or what we’re doing to fix it.

Can’t see your list of folders?

We’re hearing from a good number of you that you’re having problems seeing your e-mail folders with the new version of Windows Live Hotmail. This happens when you have the font size for your browser set to “large” or “largest.” If you’re experiencing this issue, please switch your browser font setting to “medium.” This is a temporary solution to a problem that we’re working on fixing soon. We apologize for the inconvenience and will notify you when this is fixed.

Having trouble opening messages?

A few people have mentioned that they can’t open messages. We don’t have any reports from customers yet that provide a clear list of the steps taken that produce the problem, so we would love to hear more details from you if you’re experiencing this issue. Please make sure you’ve set your browser font size to “medium” before reporting this issue, and try turning off your reading pane.

Want more space to read your messages and to open each message with a click?

You may have your reading pane turned on. Consider turning it off, especially if you have a small monitor. To do this, click "Options" in the upper right corner, and then under “Reading pane settings,” select “Off.” You may also want to maximize the size of your browser window and set your browser font size is set to “medium” for now.

Trouble scrolling your Hotmail window?

If you have a smaller monitor, try maximizing the size of your browser window. Also check your browser font size and set it to “medium.”

Can’t find your contacts when forwarding or composing a message?

We wanted to give you more space for typing your message, so we moved your list of contacts on the compose page. It’s still there, but it’s just hiding under the "To" button. Jennie from the Contacts team shares her tips:

When composing or forwarding a message, you have two easy ways to select contacts to send or forward to:

 

Select contacts from your contact list

1.       Click the To button.

2.       Click the People, Categories, or Favorites tab.

3.       Select the contacts that you want to send the message to.

4.       After you've finished selecting your contacts, click Close.

 

or…

 

Begin entering e-mail addresses or names

1.       In the box next to the To button, start typing the person's name or e-mail address. 

2.       As you type, contacts that match the letters that you're typing automatically appear below the To box.

3.       Click the person's name or e-mail address from the list to select that person.

Want to customize Hotmail’s new look?

Hotmail has changed its look to match the new direction of the rest of its Windows Live siblings. Customize your Hotmail’s look by clicking Options in the upper-right corner, and then choosing your favorite theme from the samples shown.

Was your Hotmail account unavailable?

Running a reliable e-mail system is the highest priority for the Hotmail team. We periodically need to upgrade our servers, to add new features or install security patches, so this means that your Hotmail is occasionally unavailable for a few minutes. We apologize for this inconvenience. Please understand that we do everything we can to minimize this down time.

Did your Hotmail account expire?

To keep your Hotmail account, you’ll need to sign in to check your inbox at least once every 180 days (approximately 6 months).

Keep your feedback coming. It helps us make Hotmail work better for people like you. If you’re having a problem, please include details and the steps that you took when the issue arose.

Thanks for using Windows Live Hotmail!

 - Ellie Powers, program manager, and the Windows Live Hotmail team

[Update, Nov 7, 2008]: Thanks for your thoughtful comments and questions! We're still listening, and we've posted answers to more questions here.