In September, we announced the Tech Preview of the Office Web Apps on Windows Live. As you may know, the Office Web Apps on Windows Live are free online companions to applications like Microsoft Word, Excel and PowerPoint that let you access, edit and share Microsoft Office documents from virtually anywhere.

While the Office Web Apps on Windows Live remain in Technical Preview (meaning they have don’t have all of the features of the final version*), today Microsoft is announcing the beta release of Office 2010 for Windows.

So what does this mean for you as a Windows Live user?

If you are already in the Office Web Apps Tech Preview, you get to experience much more of Office 2010 by downloading the beta and using it with Windows Live (see below).

If you are not in the Tech Preview, you can still join by downloading the Office 2010 beta and following the instructions at the end of the installation. If you don’t want to try the Office beta, you can still sign up for Office Web Apps Technical Preview in the US and Japan by clicking here.

What can you do with Office 2010 and Windows Live? Here are a couple examples:

Work and collaborate as you choose

Let’s say a friend shares a PowerPoint presentation with you on SkyDrive. With the Office Web Apps and SkyDrive, you can view and make quick edits to the presentation and share it right back using SkyDrive – all in a browser without Office installed. But let’s say you want to do more advanced editing – like adding a video. With Office 2010 installed, you can click “Open in PowerPoint” from your browser and continue in PowerPoint 2010 from where you left off. When you are done, you can save your presentation back to SkyDrive by just clicking “Save” and your friend will have access to the latest version.  

You can also create Office documents in Word, PowerPoint and Excel 2010 and use the new “Save to SkyDrive” feature in the Office File / Share menu to save the document directly to SkyDrive.  

In either case, you can be assured that your document’s formatting will have high fidelity.

Broadcast your PowerPoint presentation over the web

Imagine that you have created a PowerPoint presentation for a recent school field trip filled with photos, SmartArt and descriptions. Now you want to share it with your grandparents in another city – ideally clicking through the presentation at your own pace while speaking over the phone. With PowerPoint 2010 and a Windows Live ID, you can easily broadcast your presentation to your grandparents (or anyone) from within PowerPoint by clicking ”Slide Show” and “Broadcast Slide Show” from the ribbon (simpler than using the File menu). All your audience needs is a web browser*. They don’t need PowerPoint and they don’t even need to sign in!

For additional details on Office 2010, please visit the Office website.

Thanks,

Windows Live SkyDrive team

*During the Office Web Apps Tech Preview, OneNote Web App and certain features such as creating or editing a document in Word Web App are not available. Also, saving to SkyDrive from within OneNote 2010 is not supported. Please visit the Office website for additional details including browser compatibility information.

Phishing – what it is, and how it relates to your webmail credentials

Recently, the webmail industry experienced what was believed to be a phishing incident where several thousands of credentials from Gmail, Yahoo and Hotmail accounts were exposed on a third-party site.

For those who are wondering exactly what phishing is, and how it relates to general spam: phishing  is a criminally fraudulent attempt to acquire sensitive information such as usernames, passwords and credit card details by masquerading as a trustworthy person or institution in e-mail or on a website. These credentials are used for identity theft, financial transactions and other potentially harmful activities. While “spam” refers to being targeted with unwanted emails in general (eg the common “Viagra ads”), phishing refers to attempts to obtain your webmail credentials and other identity with fraudulent intent. And unfortunately, it isn't anything new.

But thanks to coordinated efforts across the tech industry, and partnerships between industry players who are a part of the Anti-Phishing working group, over the years most web services, users and other applications have become smarter at spotting tricks like link manipulation, phone phishing, and forged websites. Cybercriminals have adapted to improved vigilance by focusing on the consumers as easier targets than battling technology.

Unfortunately, even technologically unsophisticated attacks can be successful because people traditionally underestimate the value of their online identities, and the gates that this information can open.

In most cases, this type of phishing attack is carried out by sending a simple e-mail that appears to be from someone you know. It might appear to be from the customer support department of Hotmail or another webmail provider, or it may even appear to come from a friend of yours (most likely, the message went to their entire contact list) and asks you to provide the credentials for your webmail service or it instructs you to click a link. Probably every one of us has seen an attack like this by now!

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Some of the most common types of phishing attacks

1. Attacks that rely on forging identities. In one of the most common types of attacks, the attackers change the name that is associated with an email address to a trusted, familiar name, like for example, “Windows Live Customer Support” or "Bank of America," even though their e-mail address still is "yourfriendlyspammer@live.com". If you're not paying attention, it can be easy to mistake a message like this for a genuine request from Windows Live or your bank.

2. Attacks that use stolen accounts. In a variant of phishing, the attacker uses a previously compromised user account to send a link to everyone in the contact list for that account. If you unknowingly click the link, you land on a spam, phishing, or malware download site. As you can imagine, an e-mail you get from a friend’s account significantly increases the credibility of that message, and increases the likelihood of a successful attack. So, watch out for odd or uncharacteristic e-mails that comes from a friend’s account.

3. Attacks that ask you to provide credentials via phone. In a typical phone phishing scam, the scammer may direct you to call a customer support phone number, claiming that your account will be closed or other problems will occur if you don't call the number. A person or an audio response unit waits to take your account number, personal identification number, password, or other valuable personal data.

4. Attacks via forged websites. Many phishing attacks will convince you to trust them by including official-looking logos or other identifying information taken directly from legitimate websites. A common trick is to create a web address that resembles the name of a well-known company but is slightly altered by adding, omitting, or transposing letters. For example, the address "www.microsoft.com" could appear instead as: “www.micosoft.com” OR “www.mircosoft.com” OR “www.verify-microsoft.com”

5. Attacks using social engineering. Sometimes a scammer will include convincing details about your personal life that they found on your social networking pages. It is easy for a user to think that they are getting an email from a friend wanting to reconnect and may inadvertently provide personal information.

Once the attackers have your credentials they typically use the account for various things:

· They can use your account to send more phishing or spam messages. These could go out to people on your contact list. The response rates to campaigns using stolen e-mail accounts to send the messages are far superior to traditional campaigns because of the inherent trust your contacts have for e-mail with your name on it. Or, your email ID could be used for broader spamming, since this allows them to counter abuse detection technology for a while.

· They can sell or use information from other accounts that you've linked to the stolen e-mail account. If you've used the same password for other financial services, merchant sites, and more, the impact could be very far reaching.

· They can sell it. The resale value of a legitimate web mail account like yours is $2 a pop on the black market—twice the amount they can get for a credit card.

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How Microsoft helps protect you from these attacks

From a technology perspective, because so much phishing comes as spam (unsolicited e-mail, which may or may not contain phishing), our Hotmail spam filter, called SmartScreen, blocks over 4 billion unwanted e-mail messages per day by distinguishing between legitimate e-mail and spam. To put these numbers in perspective, let us assume on one day our filters were less effective on 0.01% of the blocked spam that is phishing. This would result in about 400,000 additional phishing messages getting through to peoples' inboxes that day. And if the response rates for these phishing attempts were anywhere close to what happened in this recent Facebook incident, then about 32,000 people would be victimized by these phishing scams, during that one day. While not all of the spam that comes through Hotmail spam filters is phishing, and the actual number of users impacted per day is quite a bit lower than it would be without spam filters, these numbers illustrate the magnitude of the problem faced by our e-mail services every single day.

We also offer (as do many other online services) various layers of protection to detect attempts at stealing user credentials. For example, after x number of efforts to log in, we require additional authentication before providing a new password. This prevents guessing of passwords by anybody other than the owner of the account. This method works well, generally, because it is not suitable for any large scale attacks but is not infalliable. Guessing can work particularly effectively with systems that employ self-service password reset. For example, in September 2008, the Yahoo e-mail account of Governor of Alaska and Vice President of the United States nominee Sarah Palin was accessed without authorization by someone who was able to research answers to two of her security questions, her zip code and date of birth and was able to guess the third, where she met her husband.

Beyond SmartScreen, there are complementary technologies that are part of your browser like the Microsoft Smartscreen Filter which is free with Internet Explorer 8, which can help protect you from phishing attacks by identifying suspicious or confirmed phishing sites, and warning you before you open the page. We have implemented Extended Validation certificates and Windows Live sign-in assistant to ensure the safety of your login credentials. Plus, always remember that Microsoft will only ask for your Windows Live ID credential pair on login.live.com – nowhere else!

In general, it is a good idea to download the latest Windows updates and keep your third-party security applications up to date as well, to keep your PC safe.

Microsoft also works with law enforcement very closely. Microsoft has supported 191 enforcement actions against phishers worldwide.  Microsoft has filed civil lawsuits and has made referrals and provides support for civil and criminal actions filed by international government and law enforcement agencies.

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Protect yourself: Tips on recognizing phishing attacks

But no amount of technology can substitute for an alert user. Because we realize that the key is making you aware, we make significant investments every year in user education and other ways of helping to make you aware of how to combat these attacks.

One thing you'll notice in Hotmail is that we provide several visual cues to help you detect and prevent problems. Going back to the first example we used, you can see that the safety bar at the top of the message indicates that the content might be unsafe.

We also make an effort to warn you when you may not know the sender:

Aside from the few cases when you communicate with a contact or another service for the first time, most mail you receive comes from known senders, that is, someone in your contact list or on your safe list. An unknown sender is a very important clue, telling you to use caution before interacting with the message or the sender.

You should also always look carefully at the "From" address:

The initial name shown in bold can be misleading; look for the e-mail address that is associated with it: yourfriendlyspammer@live.com (or more typically, you'll see random strings of letters and numbers in an e-mail address, like abcxxxx123@live.com).

Pay close attention before giving valuable information away to an e-mail address like this. Note that sometimes the address itself has been disguised to look legitimate, but when you click Reply, look at the destination address. Is it the same address as the one that sent the e-mail? If different, is it another suspiciously spam-like address?

You can find more cues in the message itself. Look for claims that are outlandish (for example, that you just won money in a lottery in another country!) or things that just make no common sense.

Microsoft will never ask you to verify your password or to provide it to us via e-mail. I just can’t reinforce this enough! We would never, ever ask for this information, period. The only time you should enter your password is on an official Windows Live ID sign-in page. So no matter why they say they need such information, please never provide your credentials over e-mail, in IM, or on a forum. Sometimes the justification provided can look downright silly, for example:

Really! Would we be running the largest email service on the planet if we had "congestion problems" that prevented us from being able to host your account anymore? And if we needed you to confirm your account, we would ask you to sign in to the service, not have you send us an e-mail containing your password.

The cases that are harder to detect are the ones where one of your friends' accounts has been compromised and the attacker is now hiding behind your friend's identity. That scenario also makes it difficult for the e-mail service to give you many visual cues to alert you, because to our spam filters, the message looks like part of an established, trusted relationship between the receiver and the sender. In these cases, be on the lookout for outlandish claims. Does the message sound like something your friend wouldn't usually say? If anything looks odd or uncharacteristic of your friend, the safe thing is to call up your friend and ask them (rather than replying to the sender, who may not really be your friend). You might indeed be helping your friend by letting them know that somebody has taken over their account.

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Here’s how YOU can help Microsoft fight phishing

Reporting spam and phishing messages helps Microsoft detect and prevent this and future attacks from making it to users inboxes. Even if this is from a friend of yours please do report because the intent is not to penalize the compromised sender but to protect the user base. The following graphic demonstrates how to report:

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What to do if you become the victim of a phishing attack

Let’s say you did your best, the technology did its best, and you still find that your credentials were compromised one way or the other. It happens to best of us – don’t panic.

Follow the steps outlined here to reclaim your account, and then take appropriate steps to ensure the safety of your other e-mail accounts, banking, credit card information, etc.

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Hopefully, these tips will make your online experience safer. Protecting users is our number one goal and with educated users on our side, the ecosystem is better equipped to tackle challenges like spam and phishing.

Best,

Krish Vitaldevara
Windows Live Hotmail team

Beginning today, Windows Live is rolling out 19 new web activity partnerships with leading global and regional web companies – including YouTube and Break.com. This means that if you choose to add, for example, the YouTube web activity to your profile on Windows Live, then whenever you post a video or mark your video favorites on YouTube, the people in your Windows Live network will see an update about your activity in their What’s new feed in Messenger, in Hotmail, on Windows Live Home, etc.  

The new web activity partnerships are a great win for our customers, for our partners, and for Windows Live:

• For customers, they make it easier to let your friends know about the sites you're discovering and the interesting stuff you’re doing on them, even if your friends aren’t using those sites yet.
• For our partners, they’re great because just like other viral sharing mechanisms, they help new people discover each site’s content within the context of global services like Messenger and Hotmail that are already used by nearly 450 million people a month. And, the content being shared is more relevant and likely to be clicked on by the viewer, because it’s coming directly from their friends.
• And of course, for Windows Live, partnerships make Messenger, Hotmail, and the rest of our suite an even better companion to all our partner sites that people already use and love.

With today’s update, we now have partnerships with 74 sites from around the world – localized into 35 languages, with broad coverage of leading sites worldwide in social networking, video sharing, photo sharing, blogging, reviews and ratings, and more.

Here is the list of our newest feed partners:

4Travel (Japan), Azbuz (Turkey), Baby Kingdom (Hong Kong), Biip.no (Norway), Break.com (US), BuscaPe (Brazil), CNET (US), L’internaute Copains (France), Doctissimo Community (France), IRC-Galleria (Finland), Libimseti.cz (Czech Republic), lokalisten.de (Germany), Multiply (US), MyVIP (Hungary), Neogen (Romania), PIXNET (Taiwan), Qype (Germany), Wat.tv (France), and YouTube (US)

Note: The region listed in parentheses after each website name indicates where the site originates, but you can add these web activities to Windows Live no matter where you live.

From a technology and standards point of view, here are a few additional fun data points about the web activities program:

• Windows Live is a co-author and active participant in the Activity Streams standards, an effort for safely exchanging activity feed content (with user opt-in) among sites and client applications. The spec is being co-authored by representatives from Facebook, MySpace, Microsoft (us), SixApart, and the DiSo project. Many other key companies like Google, Yahoo, and Netflix are participants and contributors as well.
• Activity Streams make it easy for partner sites to expose feed information or activity from their sites in a consistent format, once, so that their customers can import or connect what they’re doing on that site to other major services like Windows Live, MySpace, Facebook, etc. without their needing to implement service-specific tweaks to their feed. Likewise, service endpoints like Windows Live can expose a standard endpoint rather than implementing and maintaining custom feed ingestion for every partner.
• Windows Live is already consuming Activity Streams-compliant feeds from Facebook, MySpace, and about a dozen other of the current web activity partners who have begun publishing using the Activity Streams standard.

In related news, if you haven’t noticed yet, the newly redesigned MSN home page now has a module where, if you sign in with your Windows Live ID, you can see what’s new from your friends on Windows Live. This, of course, includes any of the activities your friends are sharing with you via our web activities partners.

If you’d like to learn more about sharing videos and other web activities on Windows Live, check out this video by my friend Angus Logan.

We hope you’ll add some web activities, try out the new partners, and help your friends on Messenger and the rest of Windows Live discover the great services you’re already enjoying.

Jeff Kunins
Windows Live engineering team

I’m Cheryl White and I’m a Program Manager for Windows Live Movie Maker. I’m here to say again how much we appreciate getting your feedback – it helps us to build a better product. Also, I’d like to talk more specifically about how users helped us shape the latest release of Windows Live Movie Maker. We’ve heard many questions about why we didn’t go with a traditional timeline model in the new Movie Maker. In this post we’re going to provide some insight into the primary reasons we changed our design, as well as a comparison between the old and new design based on organizing and editing media.

When we started building Windows Live Movie Maker, we looked at the feedback we received from our users. One of the points that stood out to us was that the average Windows Movie Maker user was intimidated by the timeline interface. Specifically, they felt there was a fairly steep learning curve to the product, and that many tasks were made difficult by the amount of steps it took to complete them. With this in mind, we wanted to use a visual solution in the new Windows Live Movie Maker that allowed both video enthusiasts and novice users a way to organize and edit their media quickly and easily. We wanted to eliminate intimidating interfaces, while still being able to manage more complex tasks. Below you will find a side-by-side comparison of the two versions with regards to organizing and editing media.

Windows Movie Maker (old) vs. Windows Live Movie Maker (new)

Adding media to your project

A big focus in the new release was to make it easy to add content and immediately see how the movie was put together. Compared to Windows Movie Maker, you first had to import your media to your collection, then add your media to your project. Only after which you would be able to preview your movie. In the new release, we simplified the process: Import your media to your project, preview your movie. The whole task can be done in seconds, yet you don’t lose any functionality. Another process we simplified in the new release of Movie Maker was to ensure that the preview window showed only the media that you were focused on in the Storyboard at any given time. The old release of Movie Maker could show media that was in your library as well as media that was in your project. There were advantages to this (as you could see photos and videos before you add them to your project) but this increased the complexity and confused novice users. The new design greatly reduces confusion, if it’s in your preview window – it’s in your project.

Based on a user study we performed in March, we made a late-breaking decision to add click on the Storyboard to add content. Since the Storyboard is the core of the application, we decided that we wanted to give you a range of options to choose from when it comes to adding media to your project: dragging and dropping files from your computer; clicking or right-clicking on the Storyboard; clicking “Add videos and photos” right in the Ribbon, from Photo Gallery clicking Make-> Make a Movie with media selected.

In the older Windows Movie Maker timeline view, users found it difficult to move items around easily and particularly difficult to adjust text. So we made adding text easier! Previously, there was a 4-step process to add title at the beginning of your movie. With Windows Live Movie Maker, one click adds the title and immediately puts you into editing mode right on the screen. It’s all WYSIWYG (What You See Is What You Get) so you can adjust easily make adjustments by entering text and then grabbing the text box with the mouse to move it around.

Viewing the project

When it comes to viewing your project, the Storyboard view has multiple benefits over the traditional Timeline view. Something to keep in mind, both are technically linear ‘timeline’ views. But instead of the timeline being one long ‘scroll right, and right, and right to view your content’ view, the Storyboard starts at the top left, scrolls right to the edge of your application window and then drops a line to start again on the left (Like a book!). Which is automatically resized as your adjust the size of Windows Live Movie Maker. This allows users to have a broader view of what’s happening in their project. Compared to the Windows Movie Maker, the task of organizing content is made exponentially easier in the storyboard.

Below is an example of ‘viewing your project’. I have nine pieces of content plus a title slide (just for example) and I want to zoom in far enough to see thumbnails of each piece of content. On the left hand side, I have Windows Movie Maker. Here I can only see four and a quarter items in my movie. Compared to Windows Live Movie Maker on the right and I can see all my content easily with plenty of room to spare.

Zoomed Out/Full Storyboard vs. Storyboard

In making the move to the new Storyboard, we found that people who wanted to see a storyboard-like representation of their items were not getting enough information at that level. Conversely, people were getting too much information with the timeline representation, so we worked at hitting a happy medium between the two. We have a time scale zoom in the new Windows Live Movie Maker that allows you to adjust the ‘viewable’ length of your media. The scale goes from individual seconds (on the precise side – see right side Windows Live Movie Maker image below), to only showing each piece of media as a thumbnail regardless of length of time each piece plays for on the broader scale. This allows you to still use relative lengths with your clips, without it being an all or nothing approach.

Zoomed In/Timeline vs. Storyboard with Time Scale

Moving items in the project

Once people add in their content, we wanted to make sure that it was easy to move items around. Showing the thumbnail of each item at any timescale means that you can step back and take a look at the big picture and make sure everything ended up just where you wanted it. In the image below, I am dragging the Chrysanthemum picture to appear after the lighthouse. Super easy with the thumbnails, but it was very difficult to get to it in the timeline version without zooming in on the timeline.

Editing items in your project

And the last main area in which we focused was to make sure that it was easy to edit items once they were added to the project. With the new Storyboard, batch edits are a snap. Using the Ribbon, we put the tools you use most often in the most logical places. Edit a video clip is under Video Tools. Changing transitions is under Animations.

But when it comes to true ‘differences’ between the old Windows Movie Maker and the new Windows Live Movie Maker, batch editing is right at the top. By allowing users to multi-select and perform edits on more than one item at a time, we’ve dramatically decreased the time it takes to polish and edit your movie. In the case below, I had to drag and drop a transition onto each and every item. In Windows Live Movie Maker, we’ve made that so easy, you just select the items you want (or CTRL+A to select all), choose a transition and you can apply it to all of the clips. To tell if your item has a transition on it, look for the slightly transparent triangle in the lower left corner of your content thumbnails.

So there you have it. A little background into how your feedback helped us build Windows Live Movie Maker. Ultimately, we are creating the product for you to use, and if there are any areas in which you’re feeling pain, let us know. We want to change that!  We’ve already gotten some really good feedback, and hope to continue receiving more.  I love Windows Live Movie Maker and I hope you will too!

Cheryl White

Program Manager

Windows Live Movie Maker

Update:

We are happy to report that this issue with the “favorites sync” feature on Windows Live Toolbar has now been fixed and you can now re-enable this feature. As we mentioned in the original post, no data was actually lost and everything will work as expected and you can again get your favorites synced back to your browser on your PC.

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For anyone who uses the “favorites sync” feature on Windows Live Toolbar, we have an important notice. We’ve heard from some customers in the last 24 hours that in some cases, favorites have been removed from the Toolbar when they synced from one or more of their PCs. We have investigated, and we want to assure you, that if this is occurring for you, your favorites are still available on SkyDrive at http://favorites.live.com.  We apologize for this inconvenience and are diligently working on a fix to restore favorites from SkyDrive to your PC.

In order to prevent any further issues with favorites sync from Toolbar, we have temporarily disabled syncing of favorites for ALL Toolbar customers until we have a fix ready. We will update this blog once we deploy a fix and restore the favorites sync service. In the meantime you can sign in to Windows Live SkyDrive to access your favorites. Alternatively, you can also recover your favorites from the Recycle Bin on the PC where they were removed.  

Once again, we apologize for the inconvenience. We hope to restore the favorites sync service as soon as possible.

- Windows Live Toolbar team

The Windows 7 launch is a proud moment for us at Windows Live. Windows Live delivers the software and services that make your new, or upgraded, Windows 7 PC lots of fun. So, we want to remind you to get the latest and greatest of Windows Live for your new Windows 7 PC!

We recommend the following top things to do after installing Windows 7:

1. Personalize your PC: Make your Windows 7 PC your own by pinning your favorite programs to the enhanced Windows Taskbar, to easily preview and switch between Windows. Then, customize your desktop with one of the many new themes available in Windows 7 (or easily download a new one that suits your personality), and drag your favorite gadgets where you want them on your desktop.

2. Download Windows Live Essentials – the killer apps for Windows 7: Once you have Windows 7 installed, go to download.live.com to download free programs for email, IM, movie-making, photos and more! 

3. Organize your multiple email accounts in one place: Organize your multiple email accounts using Window Live Mail (including Hotmail, Yahoo! Mail Plus and Gmail) so you can receive email in one place, organized into separate folders. You can even add RSS feeds to stay up on your favorite sites and blogs.

4. Import and organize your photos: Your new operating system is a great excuse to finally organize the thousands of digital photos you’ve accumulated over the years. Windows Live Photo Gallery allows you to sort your photos easily by tags, folders or dates, then clean them up with easy editing features, including auto-fix, sharpen image, panoramic stitch, and more.

5. Make a movie in less than five minutes: Now that you have your favorite photo and video memories on your Windows 7 PC, make them into movies and slideshows that you can share on the web (including easy publishing to YouTube and Facebook) or burn onto a DVD in high definition (if your camera supports it). Windows Live Movie Maker features the simple-to-navigate Windows 7 ribbon, and time-saving features like AutoMovie that automatically turn your photos, videos and music into an impressive movie – complete with titles and transitions.

6. Snap to it! Need to compare two documents side-by-side? Snap, a new feature in Windows 7, is a quick (and fun) way to increase your productivity. Snap allows you to resize open windows simply by dragging them to the edges of your screen – left or right. Then, the window will expand vertically and fill the screen, so you can easily position windows side-by-side.

7. Shake away the clutter: Need to cut through a crowded desktop and quickly focus on a single window? With Windows 7, you can click a pane and give your mouse a shake. Voila! Every window except that one disappears. Jiggle again, and your Windows are back.

Have fun with Windows 7  :-)

- The Windows Live Team

Excited about the new Zune HD? We are! A built-in HD Radio receiver, high-definition (HD) video output capabilities, organic light-emitting diode (OLED) multi-touch screen, Wi-Fi and an Internet browser… Zune HD is the first portable media player to provide all of these technologies on one device.  Oh, and by the way, did we mention that its less than 9 mm thick and only weighs 2.6 ounces!... :)

If you don’t already own one, check out http://www.zune.net for more details. If you do own one, then check out these new custom profiles for Windows Live Movie Maker. They let you save movies in a format that’s perfect for the Zune HD.

We also have a new “HD Fullscreen” (4:3 aspect ratio) profile that saves high-resolution (1440x1080) WMV video files. This new profile is ideal for making HD movies without letterboxing. This works great when you’re using photos in your movie that have a 4:3 aspect ratio.

Note: When using the HD Full Screen profile, set your project to use a standard (4:3) aspect ratio to get the most out of this profile. (To set the project aspect ratio in Windows Live Movie Maker, on the View tab, click Aspect ratio, and then click Standard.)

At the end, we’ll provide a link to an article that explains how you can make your own custom profiles to use in Windows Live Movie Maker.

New Custom Profiles

We have two custom profiles for you that let you save movies in Movie Maker in a format that works great on the new Zune HD, as well as play from a Zune HD device to an HDTV at 720p resolution².

²Zune HD player screen shows supported 720p HD videos at 480 x 272—not HD resolution. HDTV and Zune HD AV Dock (all sold separately) are required to view video at 720p HD resolution.

The “Zune HD – Device” profile will create a WMV file with a resolution and bitrate that matches the playback characteristics of the Zune HD device (480x272).

Next, the “Zune HD - 720p High Definition” profile is optimized for playing back content directly from the Zune device via the Zune HD AV Dock. It uses a slightly higher bit-rate and more advanced Windows Media codecs (Windows Media Audio 10 Pro & Windows Media Video Advanced Profile) than the standard 720p profile built into Windows Live Movie Maker.

You can download and install these custom profiles (and the custom icon for the Zune profiles) by following these steps.

1. Download this compressed (ZIP) file: http://cid-2f7eb29b42641d59.skydrive.live.com/self.aspx/Public/NewProfiles.zip

2. Extract the files to a new folder on your computer. You will see the following files:

ZuneHDNative.prx

ZuneHDNative.ico

ZuneHD720p.prx

ZuneHD720p.ico

HD Fullscreen.prx

3. Copy these files to one of the following locations on your computer (depending on if your computer is running a 32-bit or 64-bit version of Windows):

- 32-bit version of Windows: C:\Program Files\Windows Live\Photo Gallery\Video Profiles
- 64-bit version of Windows: C:\Program Files (x86)\Windows Live\Photo Gallery\Video Profiles

4. Restart Windows Live Movie Maker.

Creating Your Own Custom Profiles

If you want to make your own custom profiles to use in Windows Live Movie Maker, see the article Use custom settings to save a movie in Windows Live Movie Maker on the Windows website.

- Mike Morrison, Windows Live Movie Maker team

Windows Live Sync users,

We sincerely apologize for the extended period of downtime yesterday. We discovered a serious problem in Windows Live Sync that could cause problems in rare cases for people who used Windows Easy Transfer. As a precaution, at 9:15 Pacific Time (UTC-7) yesterday we decided to stop allowing people to sign in to Sync until we could fix the problem. Early this morning, we released an update to Sync and began allowing people to sign in again.

The next time you use your computers that are running Sync, you’ll be prompted to update the program. This is a required update and you won’t be able to connect until you install.

If your computer was already running Windows 7 before this update, you’ll have to go to the Sync website to add your computer back to all the folders you’re syncing. We know this is a hassle and we apologize for this inconvenience. You’ll also see that your computer shows up on the Sync website with a new name—you can safely go ahead and delete the old computer from the website. Rest assured that your files and folders are safe.

We found this problem in Sync through internal testing, and although it was very rare, keeping your data safe is our highest priority. We wanted to be absolutely sure that this problem wouldn’t happen to anyone.

Thanks,

Eric Doerr

Group Program Manager, Windows Live

On September 17^th, we announced the start of the Office web app technical preview. Today, we are excited to share the news that the Office web apps team has decided to expand the technical preview further, and they are inviting more people to try out the Office Web Apps. The preview is still limited to users in the US and Japan.

If you missed out on signing up for the technical preview earlier, this is a great chance to get in! Check out their announcement earlier today.

For a limited time, you can sign-up for a Technical Preview account here (if you are already a part of the technical preview, this link will generate an error): http://skydrive.live.com/acceptpreview.aspx/.documents?aobrp=browse

- The Windows Live team

Members of the Windows Live Writer team attended WordCamp Seattle on Sept 26, 2009. WordCamps are annual gatherings for learning about all things WordPress, hosted in various cities across the country. It’s a great way to learn more about WordPress and network with other WordPress users. The Writer team was there in force giving demos of Writer publishing to WordPress.  Many people aren’t aware of how well Live Writer works with WordPress. It gives users a completely WYSIWYG publishing experience and it makes publishing photos and video simple.

In preparation for the event, developer Brandon Turner created three new Live Writer plug-ins to use with WordPress blogs. These new plug-ins enable —comments management, custom fields, and blog title/tagline editor. If you are a blogger yourself, you might want to check these out.

Here is a quick overview of the plug-ins:

• The first plugin lets you change the title and tagline of your blog. Often times you have seen the default Just another Wordpress.com weblog. If you enter your Twitter username and click 'import from twitter' it will import a recent twitter status as your blog tagline. It will look for your most recent status that is not an @ reply and doesn't contain a link.

• The second plugin allows you to manage comments on your Wordpress blog from inside of Windows Live Writer. 'New' means that the comment has been posted but it is waiting for moderation. 'Approved' means the comment has been published and is visible to all users on your blog. 'Spam' are comments that have been detected as spam and are hidden from your blog. Clicking the words across the top will show you a list of comments in each of those sections.

• The, third plugin, called custom field plugin lets you add wordpress custom fields to your blog. This plugin shows up after you have clicked publish inside of Windows Live Writer. The first time you click publish once the plug in is installed it will ask you if you want to enable it. Click 'yes' when you see the dialog below.

Then the next dialog will show up. This will allow you to enter new custom fields for your blog. Enter the key/values for the custom field in the grid below. And when you are done you can close the dialog, it will save the custom fields to your blog. The next time you come back to this dialog, there will be links on the top with the keys you have entered in the past. This way, if you always insert the same custom fields, you will only have to enter them the first time. When selected on a custom field, you can click the checkbox. This will generate a snippet of PHP code which you can use in your Wordpress theme to display the custom field.

These plugins are available for use and further development (the linked DLL and Zip file contains all the new plug-ins)

Additionally there are many other Writer plugins available to do almost anything you can imagine.  Check out gallery.live.com for a list of free writer plugins.

Best,

Windows Live Writer team