We are committed to providing a safe, secure and positive experience for our more than 300 million customers across the globe using Windows Live Messenger every month. To deliver on that commitment, beginning on August 25, we started asking our customers using versions 8.1, 8.5 and 14.0 to upgrade to the newest version of Messenger. The upgrade will provide customers with the latest software updates including code fixes and feature enhancements, as well address vulnerabilities discussed in the Microsoft Security Advisory 973882 that existed in previous versions of Windows Live Messenger.

The upgrade process will take place in a phased approach over the next several weeks. For details on the phased approach and information on the new features that this upgrade will turn on, please visit the Messenger blog

Want to upgrade now?  You don’t have to wait for the notification. In fact, we encourage you to download the updated version of Messenger right now by visiting http://download.live.com .

If you aren’t sure which version you have, you can go to the Help menu and select About Messenger.  Help –> About Messenger.  If you have a version that is lower than 14.0.8089 you will need to upgrade.

- Windows Live Team

Some of you may have noticed that lately, you can no longer add photos directly into the body of a Windows Live Hotmail message the way you used to do. The Windows Live team is constantly reviewing Hotmail to ensure quality service to our customers. During a recent review, we identified an incompatibility with Internet Explorer that raised a potential security concern with photo uploads, and we made the decision to temporarily remove the feature.

The Hotmail team takes security very seriously and we expect to bring back the photo upload feature by the end of September. In the meantime, you can still add pictures as attachments to your Hotmail messages, by clicking Attach, and then File, and then selecting the picture you want to include.

We apologize for any inconvenience that this may cause you until this fix is complete.

The Windows Live team

Last week we announced an update to Windows Live Essentials (including the new Windows Live Movie Maker—pretty slick!). But we didn’t mention yet that the update also addressed some customer and compatibility issues in Windows Live Mail. You can install all of the new updates from http://download.live.com.

Updates to Windows Live Mail include:

• Windows Live Mail can now properly import Outlook Express e-mail account settings that were transferred from a Windows XP to a new Vista or Windows 7 system using the Windows Easy Transfer wizard.
• We addressed a problem some users had with launching Windows Live Mail. In some cases, after you closed Windows Live Mail, the program would appear to close, but the wlmail.exe process would continue to run in the background. That process would prevent Mail from launching the next time you tried to open it.
• We’ve fixed a problem that occurred in Vista and Windows 7, where Windows Live Mail wouldn’t connect properly to POP e-mail servers using secure socket layers (SSL). This affected some users of Yahoo! Mail, but with the update it is now resolved.

This update is version 2009 (Build 14.0.8089.0726). To see what your current version number is, in Windows Live Mail, click the Help icon (the question mark next to where you sign in), and then click About Windows Live Mail.

One last thing… we’d like to thank you for your feedback.  We rely on it as we continue to improve Windows Live Mail. Thank you for using Windows Live Mail and for helping us build a great product.

Rodger Benson
Lead Program Manager
Windows Live Mail

Yesterday we announced the final release of Windows Live Movie Maker. This was actually part of a larger release of updates to the Windows Live Essentials suite of programs. It includes a major update to Windows Live Family Safety, and minor updates to many of the other Windows Live Essentials programs.

Today over on the Windows Experience blog, Brandon Le Blanc tells you all about the Family Safety update. In short, the updated version of Windows Live Family Safety still helps parents keep their kids safer online by helping them manage which websites their kids can visit, and which contacts they can communicate with in Windows Live Spaces, Hotmail and Messenger. But now Family Safety also provides deeper integration with Windows, resulting in fewer log-in prompts and faster web surfing compared to previous versions. Also, because Family Safety now uses Windows accounts as the basis for storing settings, parents no longer need to create a Windows Live ID for each child. To read more about all the Family Safety improvements, head on over to the Windows Experience blog.

And if you haven’t got it yet, be sure to download the latest version of Windows Live Essentials from download.live.com. 

- The Windows Live team

Today we’ve released Windows Live Movie Maker from beta as part of a refresh to our Windows Live Essentials download. Windows Live Movie Maker is the first application designed for Windows 7 and is built to make beautiful movies from your photos and videos very quickly. Download the new Windows Live Movie Maker to get an immediate (and free!) upgrade to your Windows Live experience.

Introducing the new Windows Live Movie Maker

Windows Live Movie Maker is one more example of why Windows Live Essentials are must-have applications for people using Windows. With the goal of making it easy to communicate and share with the people you care about, we’re continually updating these applications to ensure they take advantage of the best Windows has to offer. With today’s release, you will be able to see a variety of ways Windows Live Movie Maker takes advantage of Windows 7 including expanded support for HD video so you can create great looking movies using the most popular devices on the market – including your mobile phone or Flip Video camcorder.

We’ve been anticipating the official release of Windows Live Movie Maker for a while now (see our team’s previous posts here and here). As the team outlined in their posts, we’ve really taken the time to rethink what great video editing software should do. We heard your feedback and designed this version so you can quickly and easily create short movies and photo slideshows that can be shared the way that works best for you. The AutoMovie feature in Windows Live Movie Maker literally creates a polished movie out of your photos and video clips in under a minute, which means it can take less time to create a movie than it does to watch it.

According to recent research from IDC, over 60 percent of US consumers watch user-generated videos online. They also found that almost half of the videos shared on the Internet are just a few minutes long.* While video is becoming just as easy to capture as photos, it’s nowhere near as easy to edit and share. Current video editing software is complicated and can require a large time investment just to create a two-minute video you want to share on YouTube. I recently used Windows Live Movie Maker to create a movie out of 50 photos, three video clips, and a music soundtrack in 30 seconds using the AutoMovie feature in Windows Live Movie Maker. I couldn’t have done that in iMovie – it doesn’t have a feature for combining photos, videos and music in one automatic step.

We’ve heard you say that you want powerful editing tools that work quickly, so your masterpiece can go from camera to YouTube in a flash, so that’s what we built.

Here are a few reasons I think you will enjoy the new-and-improved Windows Live Movie Maker:

1. It’s easy to create beautiful videos. Movie Maker can create great looking movies in under a minute. Just add your photos and videos to Movie Maker, and select your music, then click the Auto Movie button. Auto Movie will knit those photos and videos together with striking effects and transitions, and even fit them to a soundtrack of your choosing. Basic movie – done. If you want to spend more time editing your video clips, adding animations, or visual effects you can, but the heavy lifting is done for you in less than a minute.
2. More customization features easily add polish to your movie. You told us after the beta came out that you’d like more transitions, effects, and video editing features. The new Movie Maker has more than 60 transitions, 18 pan and zoom options, and 20 visual effects that you can apply to photos or videos, plus video trim, split, and fade capabilities. As a movie maker myself, I love the range of rich editing capabilities in this version and particularly like being able to auto-preview transitions like cross-fade, dissolve, pixelate, and shatter by hovering over the effect and watching it in real time.
3. It’s simple to share your movie. Videos are for sharing, so Movie Maker makes it easy to share online with a few clicks. Post your video to YouTube right from the main menu, or add a quick plug-in and easily publish to Facebook. We will be adding more plug-ins to popular sharing sites in the future. You can also burn your creation to a DVD or save it in high definition to play on your TV. Save it down to a smaller format and transfer it to a mobile device or send it via e-mail.
4. It works great with Windows 7. With Windows 7 and Windows Live Movie Maker it’s easy to get your photos and videos off your camera and onto your PC. You’ll also get increased capabilities for creating HD movies and enjoy support for additional file formats – including QuickTime formats, AVCHD and .MPEG4. And most importantly, if you use Office or Windows already, you’ll find Movie Maker easy to navigate because it uses a similar design.

Want to see what the new Windows Live Movie Maker can do? We created a few sample movies that showcase its new transitions, effects, and editing capabilities:

• Feldman Summer Fun
• Baby Talk: Meet Isabella
• A Year in the life of the Feldmans

Not sure where to start? Check out these videos that demonstrate how some of our favorite features work:

• Getting started with Windows Live Movie Maker
• Using AutoMovie
• Easily create beautiful videos using AutoMovie
• Three ways to share your video creation (YouTube, burn to DVD, save as HD)
• Add photos and videos to Movie Maker to get started
• Add transitions or visual effects
• Edit video clips to include the best footage in your movie
• Add and edit music
• Why we like the storyboard
• Add a title, captions and credits
• Publish to YouTube

We’ll be posting more of these how-to videos at the bottom of this page. Keep checking back to learn new tips and tricks!

Change isn’t always easy, and I know there have been some growing pains as we’ve moved from Windows Movie Maker to Windows Live Movie Maker. I want to address one thing we think you might be concerned about – OS support. As Mike mentioned in his earlier post, in order to take advantage of the latest and greatest technologies available on the Windows platform, we optimized the new Windows Live Movie Maker for Windows Vista and Windows 7. As a result you get support for newer file formats like HD, a new graphics driver model which brings more reliable and stable support for high-end graphics, and a new engine on top of DirectX, which improves speed and enables even more advanced capabilities over time. If you’re still using Windows XP, Windows Movie Maker 2.1 for Windows XP is still a great option.

When we told you that Movie Maker was becoming part of Windows Live Essentials we said we believed that doing this would enable us to provide you with software updates more often. We’re excited to introduce the new Windows Live Movie Maker today with so many great new features because we think it delivers on that promise – we’re continually updating the Windows Live applications so you can communicate, share, and keep your life in sync. Grab some photos or video clips and give it a try!  

- Brian Hall, and the Windows Live team

* IDC, Consumer Internet Video Survey Results: Internet Video Services and Home Networking, Doc # 218886, June 2009

The tenth anniversary of Windows Live Messenger is a tremendous milestone, but the Messenger team isn’t the only one celebrating this summer.

Last December we launched Windows Live Photos, giving you a place to upload and share all of your photos. Since then, we’ve gotten lots of fantastic feedback from you allowing us to make the service even better.

A few weeks ago we hit a milestone for Windows Live Photos: one billion photos uploaded!

This is a significant part of the more than seven billion photos posted on Windows Live today (most of which were uploaded before we launched "Windows Live Photos" as a separate service). Just how significant is a billion photos? Well, if you signed up for a new account and started uploading one photo per second, you would upload your billionth photo some time in 2040! According to a report by Forrester Research last year, the average owner of a digital camera only takes 28 digital photos per month. At that rate, it would take the entire population of Seattle nearly five years to take a billion photos!

While we’re excited about the number of photos uploaded, we’re even more excited that you’re taking so many photos and sharing them with your family and friends. As of this month, users have shared their photo albums over 250 million times! That’s a lot of aunts, uncles, grandparents and friends happy to see what’s going on in your life.

We think the best way to share your photos is with Windows Live Photos, and it’s great to see that so many of you do, too.  We look forward to the next billion photos!

-The Windows Live Photos team

On June 4, 2009, Mike Torres wrote that “we’re actively listening to and considering your feedback to enhance and improve Movie Maker.” My name is Cheryl White, and I’m a Program Manager on the Windows Live Movie Maker team. I’m here to provide a little behind-the-scenes scoop on how we conducted user research in our product development cycle to get first-hand feedback from people trying out the new Movie Maker. User research (often called “usability studies”) is a core part of product development at Microsoft.

When developing Movie Maker, we needed to consider all the people who were familiar with Windows Movie Maker in the past and all the people who are new to making movies on a computer. We needed to carefully balance making advanced features easy for experienced movie makers to find, while making the basic features of the program straightforward for beginning movie makers. We held a number of focus groups and studies in our studios and invited both experienced movie makers and those who had never made a movie before to ensure that Windows Live Movie Maker found this sweet spot. We concentrated on finding ways to make progress on these two design goals:

• Simple & discoverable – The user interface should be easy to use, without being too basic.
• Easy to comprehend – People should be able to see and understand what is in their movie at any given time.

Simple & discoverable

We know there are few things more daunting than staring at a blank page. So we wanted to make it easy for people to get started in Movie Maker. We used a research tool called “eye tracking,” which allowed us to see exactly what parts of the window people were looking at. Reviewing the eye-tracking information, we discovered that when people opened Movie Maker and were told to make a movie, they didn’t know where to begin.

 A cool image of the information we get from eye tracking.
Red areas show where people looked the most and green areas where they looked the least.

We took a look at the steps required to make a really great, shareable movie in just a few quick clicks: easily add photos and videos, and then add music to accompany them. We wanted to optimize for these tasks. This ultimately led us to promote ways of adding content right from the storyboard.

Next, we took a look at the secondary tasks we’ve seen people perform in Windows Movie Maker in the past: adjusting color, adding visual effects, and modifying the properties of items. We wanted to reduce the number of clicks it took to accomplish the secondary tasks. So we made sure that labels and instructions were as meaningful as they could be. Just by concentrating on these areas, we found that 85% of participants felt much more confident using the program after only an hour of using it.

This was great news.

Easy to comprehend

We wanted people to really understand at a glance in Windows Live Movie Maker what is happening as they’re making their movie. We needed to make sure that the icons and other representations of things made sense to people who hadn’t worked on developing Movie Maker with us. Our usability studies helped us understand where people were getting confused and where we were sending the wrong message so we could work on correcting these issues. We found that people really liked the storyboard and being able to see more than one row of what was in the project. We also found that after the initial reaction of it being “different,” people quickly got used to the program and reported increased confidence after a single usability study session.

With any early stage product, there comes a time where you have to make hard decisions. User research helped us focus on the problems that were the most important to fix. Through our research, we identified a list of things that we needed to fix right away, and a secondary list of things we may still need to improve in the future.

We’re super excited about the upcoming release of Windows Live Movie Maker, and hope you’ll also like it when you try it out soon.

Cheryl White

- Windows Live Movie Maker team

In 2010, we’ll be retiring Windows Live Events and allow you instead to plan and manage social events all in one place through Windows Live Calendar.

Here are answers to a few questions you may have about this transition.

Q.  I use Windows Live Events. What does this mean for me?

A.  We understand that many of you have already been using Windows Live Events for a while, and so you may have some concerns. To make sure you have time to save any photos or files that are stored with your events, we’ll be retiring Events in phases.

Starting in early September, 2009, you won’t be able to create new events using Windows Live Events. You’ll still be able to access and edit your existing events until 2010, and we encourage you to save your photos and files from your existing events before then. Here’s how:

Saving photos

Go to http://events.live.com and sign in with your Windows Live ID. Click View your events at the top of the page. Click the event you want to save photos from. and then click the Photos link on the left side of the event page. Select the photo album that you want to save, and then click More at the top of the page. In the More dropdown menu, click Download, and then click Download with Photo Gallery. Select the photos that you want to save, and then click Download.

Saving files

Click the SkyDrive link on the left side of each event page. Select the Documents folder. Click the specific file that you want to download. Click Download, and then open the file or save it to your computer.

And here’s a video to walk you through the steps:

In 2010, we’ll retire Windows Live Events entirely. At that time, you will no longer be able to get to any of your old events, and you won’t be able to download and save old event photos and videos.

Q.  How can I create new events on Windows Live after Windows Live Events retires?

A.  You can use Windows Live Calendar to create, plan, and manage events and invite friends and family all from one place—and you don’t need to wait for Windows Live Events to retire! You can check out these step–by-step instructions, or watch this video that shows how easy it is to create an event in Calendar:

We’ll continue to update you through this blog as well as through e-mail as we get closer to the actual Events retirement date. Thanks to all of you who’ve used Windows Live Events, and we’re looking forward to creating new features in Windows Live Calendar that’ll help you plan and manage your events.

- The Windows Live team