We’ve been reading our mail and all the comments you’ve made on the recent Windows Live Hotmail updates. While the new Hotmail works well for most of our customers, we’ve also been hearing from many of you here on the blog and through Windows Live Support who’ve had trouble. We’re in the process of addressing all the feedback and wanted to give you an update on the changes we’re making.

Over the last few weeks we’ve rolled out fixes that resolve many of the issues you’ve reported. These include problems when using a larger text size in the browser, viewing your favorite contacts, accessing Hotmail from Firefox on Linux, and problems opening some messages. These fixes have now gone out to everyone, so you shouldn’t continue to see these problems.

Our next update, in mid-December, will address how scrolling works. We’re making the new Hotmail work more like the Classic version for those of you with the reading pane turned off. When we moved to the new version we optimized for screen resolutions that were 1024x768 and above. In smaller resolutions like 800x600, we’ve seen cases where the browser scroll bars overlap the message scroll bars, making it harder to move through your messages. Our next update will fix this problem, and we appreciate your patience as we continue to work on this.

If you use a smaller screen resolution, you may have been seeing multiple scroll bars, like this:

But with the new fixes, you’ll soon see this instead:

Coming early next year, you’ll see yet another update, which will complete the transition to the new Hotmail. We’ll be changing the banner ad at the top of the page to a vertical ad on the right-hand side, which will allow you to see more messages and more of your personal folders on the screen at once. We’ll also be adding more themes, increasing the number of messages on each page, and embedding instant messaging with Messenger right into Hotmail.

We appreciate all your feedback and want you to know that it has been critical in our work to make Hotmail better. Thank you for using Windows Live Hotmail.

- The Hotmail team

Windows Live wants to make it easier than ever to connect from your PC to the web and we give you all the pieces. But sometimes, we realize that you might have accounts with other companies, so Windows Live is making it really easy to connect with other websites, too. 

For example, in the coming weeks, as changes to Windows Live are released, you’ll be able to see updates from services like Twitter and Flickr on your Windows Live Home page. And now, with the help of plug-ins, Windows Live Photo Gallery beta and Windows Live Movie Maker beta allow you to publish photos and videos to sites outside of the Microsoft family, like Facebook or YouTube.

 
Installing and setting up a new plug-in that allows you to publish to Facebook

Because there is a continually evolving list of web services that you use and might want to publish to, we’ve shared our publishing API with anyone who wants to use it, so that creative and industrious developer types can create their own plug-ins to work with Photo Gallery and Movie Maker.

After installing the “Live Upload to YouTube” plug-in,
you can publish to YouTube from Movie Maker

Check this list of available plug-ins to see which ones you might want to install. Over time, the list will undoubtedly grow, so you can choose the ones that work best for you.

- Windows Live team

I’m Brian Hall, and I lead the Windows Live business group.

Today is a very exciting day for Windows Live – for the hundreds of people who work on building and delivering Windows Live, for the hundreds of millions of people who use Windows Live, and for the thousands of Windows Live advertisers and partners. Around the world, today is the day that we’re finally able to share the innovations in communications and sharing that we’ve been working on and will release shortly.

People sometimes ask me “What is Windows Live?” and “How does that relate to Hotmail, Messenger and Photo Gallery?” Historically, people have had entirely separate e-mail, IM, and sharing solutions – with different contact lists and totally different tools. But we’re now at a point where we can go beyond siloed communication tools that don’t work together – and start to integrate the best of them together with one contact list. In Windows Live, we’ve been working towards this for a while, but with this upcoming release, we’re taking a huge step forward in providing an integrated personal communication service – integrated across Windows Live and across other services on the web.

Quite simply, our goal with Windows Live is to help keep your life in sync. We do this by giving you great tools for communicating and sharing with the people you care about most. We help you bring together all of your digital stuff from across the web. And we optimize your experiences for where you are – on your PC, in Outlook, on your mobile phone, and on the web.

For those of you who already use Hotmail and Messenger, you’ll now be getting an integrated and complete communications solution with Windows Live, especially now that we’re bringing social interactions into many parts of Windows Live. This begins with a unified contact list where you control permissions - who can see when you’re online, whether they can view your profile, or which of your groups they can access. Anywhere you see people, you can e-mail them or send them an instant message. You’ll also have a simple and polished way to share photos and files. Since we’re all about connecting people, we’ve made groups part of your e-mail, IM, and photo experiences. Your group can have its own website, calendar, shared files, network, and other ways of keeping on top of what matters to the group. We’ve added calendars to Windows Live, in Hotmail, in groups, in Windows Live Mail, and even in Outlook. To combine all of these social interactions, we’ve built a “What’s New” feed that aggregates these social updates. And you won’t have to go looking for what’s new, it will be an integrated part of what you’re doing – so whether you’re in Messenger, Hotmail, on the new Home page, within Groups, or anywhere else in Windows Live, you’ll have the most relevant social updates from people in your network.

With this release, we’re also investing heavily in a broad range of partners to connect you with more of the places you share things online and keep them all in sync. We know that you probably have multiple accounts and use different companies for different Internet services. But you shouldn’t have to keep signing in to lots of different websites to keep on top of your digital life. With Windows Live, you can now pull in feeds from other websites, so the network of people you know on Windows Live can also see when you tweet on Twitter or share photos on Flickr. You can easily pull in your address books from places like Facebook, Hi5, and Bebo, so you don’t have to manage multiple networks of friends. Windows Live will bring it all together for you – so that you have one place to stay up to date and one easy way of sharing updates with your network.

For your Windows PC, we have a new set of programs that we’re calling Windows Live Essentials that connect your PC experience with Windows Live and the web. It includes tools to help you manage your e-mail and calendar, even when you’re offline, to edit and post photos with people tags to Windows Live, to compose and publish rich blogs, and more. These programs are great to use with Windows Live – and with with many other services that you and other Windows customers use. Windows Live Mail, one of several programs included in Windows Live Essentials, pulls all your e-mail accounts and contact lists together, including AOL, Gmail, Yahoo, and any POP or IMAP e-mail service. You can use Photo Gallery to post to one of many photo services that support our plug-in architecture. Or you can use Writer to post rich blog entries to any blogging service that supports Really Simple Discover (RSD). So every Windows user can communicate and share better with Windows Live Essentials.

There’s a lot here, so let me show you a few videos that give you a real sense of the new products:

So, when can you get the new Windows Live and what does it include? In September, we released a set of beta programs for your PC. These programs will come out of beta soon - they’re the Windows Live Essentials. We also started rolling out updates to Hotmail customers. Over the coming months, we’ll release additional updates, as well as many new programs and services that we’re launching for the PC, web, and mobile phone.

Millions of you are already using the betas of our PC programs and have been providing us with great feedback. We’re hard at work on finalizing these products, and we’ll soon be releasing the final versions of Windows Live programs for your PC, known collectively as Windows Live Essentials. The Essentials include Messenger, Photo Gallery, Movie Maker, Mail, Writer, Toolbar, and Family Safety.

On the web, we’ll be updating Hotmail, Spaces, Calendar, SkyDrive, and Windows Live Home – your dashboard to what is happening across Windows Live. We’re also introducing new profile, groups, and photos experiences on the web.

For your mobile phone, we’ll be adding new web experiences available on any phone with a browser, and new SMS (text message) experiences – these will include the ability to easily upload and share photos, manage your e-mail and calendar, and send and receive updates from people in your network, all from your mobile phone.

Here are pictures of some of the updated programs and services that we’ll soon be releasing. Click each image to see all the details. 

Messenger lets you have rich real-time conversations, express yourself with different pictures and backgrounds, and get real-time updates about what’s new with the people in your network.

Photo Gallery lets you tag people in your photos by selecting them from your Windows Live contact list.

You can also sort pictures in Photo Gallery according to who is in them.

  Photo slide shows on the web have backgrounds that change to match your photos.

  Writer lets you embed a photo montage in your blog post.

Hotmail will allow you to easily embed pictures and other info from a web search directly into an e-mail message.

  Your profile page shows people in your network what’s new with you.

Groups can have their own discussions on Windows Live.

  Windows Live Mail lets you easily embed pictures into your e-mail messages.

  Windows Live Toolbar provides quick updates about what’s new with the people in your network.

  A redesigned home page, with a header that changes depending on the time of day and your local weather. This one was during a recent, foggy evening.

It’s going to be an exciting few months as we put the final touches on this release. And we’ll be getting them out to you as soon as we can. As always, continue to send us your feedback, as we’d love to hear what you think. Also, if you’d like to keep up with our blogs using Twitter, you can follow us from here http://twitter.com/windowslivewire.

- Brian

Hi, everyone.

Thanks again for all of the comments.

We're reading all of your comments, and we’re working on fixing many of the issues that we're hearing matter most to you. While we work, here are a few temporary solutions that we hope can provide some relief.

1. Try Windows Live Mail, a program you can install on your computer from http://get.live.com/wlmail. This is free, it works on Windows XP or Vista, and it will let you access your Windows Live Hotmail and contacts, plus you can add other e-mail accounts and view them all in one place. 
2. Try the Outlook Connector to read your Hotmail if you already use Microsoft Office Outlook. You can download the Outlook Connector for free to access your Windows Live Hotmail, contacts, and calendar.
3. [Updated 11/25/08] If you are a Linux user, or if If you need to access Hotmail from the web, try the mobile version of Hotmail on the web at http://mobile.live.com/hm. It doesn't have all of the features of regular Hotmail, but it may help you get to your inbox and other folders.
4. [Added 11/25/08] Hotmail works best with the latest version of your browser. Here is how to upgrade your browser.

• Internet Explorer
  • Go to http://www.microsoft.com/windows/downloads/ie/getitnow.mspx
  • Consider downloading Internet Explorer 7
• Firefox: Some users but not all users who are using Firefox 2.0.0.18 are having trouble opening mail. Upgrading to Firefox 3 fixes the problem.
  • Go to www.mozilla.org
  • Click the link to download Firefox 3
  • [New! 12/3/08] We have found that some people using Firefox version 2.0.0.18 and Real Player may have better results by upgrading to the latest version of Real Player at http://www.real.com.
• Safari
  • Go to http://www.apple.com/safari/download
  • Download the version that works for your computer

Again, we’re working on fixing the problems you’re reporting just as quickly as we can. We know that the options mentioned here are not permanent solutions, but we hope they might be helpful in the meantime.

Thanks for your patience.

  - Ellie Powers, program manager, Windows Live Hotmail

>>> Updated 11/25/08:

• We have fixed the bug that was affecting Hotmail customers using Linux with Firefox. They should be able to access Hotmail normally now. Thanks for your patience!
• We’ve also added information above (item 4) about how to upgrade your browser.
• See more bug-fix updates in this other blog post.

 >>> [New! 12/16/08] If you have more Hotmail questions or are experiencing issues with your Hotmail account, please go to the new Windows Live Solution Center at www.windowslivehelp.com. You can read more about it here: http://windowslivewire.spaces.live.com/blog/cns!2F7EB29B42641D59!29089.entry.

By the end of this week, all Windows Live Hotmail users will be upgraded to the new Hotmail. The rollout has been slow because we’ve been reading and listening to your comments. We’ve read all the comments, followed up with some of you, and changed the service as we went. Since our original announcement, we have read and analyzed several thousand comments, fixed several bugs, and released five updates to the code so far.

So, we want you to know that we’re listening, we’re making changes, and we want the service to be great.  

Here are answers to a few of your frequently asked questions.

Q: Why did you change? I liked the old version the way it was.

When we asked our users how we could make Hotmail better, the majority of people said they wanted the experience to be cleaner and faster. The new experience was designed with this in mind.

Now, we understand that everyone has different tastes and computer configurations. Although the majority of people in our tests preferred the new look and themes, some people didn’t.  So, while most of you have seen Hotmail improve, some of you have not, and we apologize for any inconvenience this may have caused you.

Q: I find this hard to use. Was this tested with real users?

Yes, it was. We tested with several thousand people around the world and used their feedback to improve the design prior to releasing to all users. We interviewed hundreds of them to hear their opinions, measured their success rate accomplishing common tasks, and surveyed them  to see how much they liked the new service compared to the old one. The data from our tests showed that most users found the new Hotmail to be faster, more reliable, and more usable. 

Q: Can I opt out? Can I get the old version back?

A: We can’t provide two fast, secure, reliable experiences, so we have decided to just keep the new version. However, we will continue to improve the new version, based on many of your comments here, to make it work better for you.

And here are some specific concerns we’ve seen in your feedback, and what we’re doing to fix them:

Q: Where did my folders go? I can’t see enough of the page. The ad is too big. Can you give me more space?

A: We understand that the design isn’t optimal for many users who have smaller monitors, so we’re working on improvements to page layout that will give your inbox more space.

In the meantime, if you have a smaller display, you should maximize your browser window for best results (in Windows, look in the upper-left corner of the browser, click the Internet Explorer, Firefox, or Safari logo, and in the menu that appears, click Maximize).

Also, your folders are not gone — you may need to scroll the folder list to see them all.

Q: I can’t forward e-mail because I can’t find my contacts. I don’t know where my favorites went!

A: The new “contact picker” and “auto-complete” features were designed to save you time.

·         While addressing an e-mail message, just type a couple letters of the name and we will show just the names that match those letters.

·         Or, while addressing an e-mail message, click the To: button to see the full list of all of your contacts.

·         To set up your favorites, go to the Contact list and click the yellow star next to each name that you want to be a favorite.

While this may require an extra click for some of you, our research shows that typing a few letters of the name is usually a faster way to find an address than scrolling through a list. Once you get used to it, we hope you’ll find auto-complete useful, too. We also have some cool ideas about how to use the space where the favorites list used to be. We’ll keep listening to your feedback on this one.

Q: I don’t like the themes. What are you doing about this?

A: We agree that more themes are needed. Additional themes are being designed now, and will be coming soon.

Q: There aren’t as many messages on the page. I want to see more!

A: We hear you, so we’ll be increasing the default number of messages per screen, and providing the option for power users to see many more. Look for these changes in an upcoming release.

Q: Where is the spell checker?

A: For users of Internet Explorer, there is a Check Spelling button; clicking this button draws red underlines below misspelled words, and then clicking the underlined words shows you suggestions. For users of Firefox and Safari, you can just use the built-in spell checker in your browser, so misspelled words will be underlined automatically.

We are constantly reading your feedback, so please let us know what you think. We want you to love the new Hotmail!

- Mike Schackwitz, Lead program manager, Windows Live Hotmail