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