I havent been on the EBS team for a while now but this news came as a huge shock.  If theres some consolation Im really glad to see Microsoft is making the existing EBS 2008 customers whole by getting them to the stand-alone server products for free. 

For those of you who want to only download the Outlook Connector you can go to http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyID=9A2279B1-DF0A-46E1-AA93-7D4870871ECF&displaylang=en. 

In addition to the product planning I do for Windows Live, I also work with the Microsoft Office Outlook team on the Outlook Connector.  What is the Outlook Connector you ask?  It is a grossly underutilized sync solution for people who are both Hotmail users and who have Outlook 2003 or 2007.  If youre interested in the technical details of what it does, take a look at, Omars blog (my coworker in Windows Live).  Basically, it syncs your Hotmail email, calendar, and contacts via a technology called DeltaSync (multiply the functionality of IMAP by 10x <g>).  

Sadly, doing a search in your favorite search for the words sync Outlook with Hotmail (no quotes) yields very few results (other than Omars) for the Outlook Connector, so I doubt many people can find it.  Thats a shame because I know from my research that people want to easily interchange work and personal items (mainly calendar and contacts).   The Outlook Connector makes that possible!   I use it on each of the 7 PCs I frequently use.  Its incredibly powerful.  If you receive an email to your work email account that is really personal when you reply you can change which account its sent from to be your Hotmail account.  With Outlooks side by side calendar support (see link and picture below), you can drag an appointment from your work calendar on the left to your Hotmail Calendar on the right. 

You can get the Outlook Connector from http://download.live.com.  If you install the entire Essentials suite and have Outlook on your PC itll be automatically installed.  You can also just pick the OLC if for some reason you didnt want the rest of Windows Live Essentials.

Heres my cheap way of increasing the likelihood that someone will be able to find this post:

sync, synchronization, Hotmail, Outlook, 2003, 2007, Exchange, e-mail, calendar, contacts, Microsoft 

:-)

Do you have existing non-Hotmail/Live email account that youve had for a number of years?  Are you intrigued by the some of the new features and functionality of Windows Live Hotmail?  Perhaps youre running into the other providers email storage limit?  Tired of having to mark all your email in Gmail with a category?  Then I have a deal for you.   

A company called TrueSwitch has technology that enables you to copy/export your email, contacts/address book, calendar, etc data from your current, non-Microsoft service (e.g. Yahoo) to Windows Live Hotmail (which includes email, contacts/address book, calendar, etc).  Microsoft has an agreement with TrueSwitch so you can copy/export your mail et al from your existing account to Windows Live Hotmail without paying a fee.   Here is a list of services that TrueSwitch supports:

The only gotcha Ive seen using the service is all of the imported emails are shown/marked as unread.  The workaround is to move all of the read emails in the current service into their own folder (perhaps named Read Email), and then migrate your account via TrueSwitch.  Once all the email has been imported into Hotmail, you can then mark all of the email in the Read Email folder as read and then move them into your Inbox folder (that contains all of your unread email).   The date and timestamps from the email are preserved so you wont see the last six years email as if itd all arrived today.   Unfortunately, Gmail only has categories which I havent found a good workaround for yet.  Suggestions welcome.   

To test out Windows Live Hotmail with all of your real data from your legacy email service go to:

https://secure5.trueswitch.com/winlive/  

NOTE: TrueSwitch only copies/exports the old account data, it does not move it. Nothing from your old account will be deleted.

I am humbled by how much traffic my blog post yesterday generated.  It was apparently linked to/picked up by a couple of sites with quite a readership.  I/we got an amazing amount of email to the new account.   Wow. 

However, I need to right a wrong.  The Windows Live team has an official means for submitting feedback already in place.  Go to http://feedback.live.com, click on the appropriate product or service, and then type in your feedback.  I couldnt be easier.   Im relatively new to this group and I didnt even know that site existed.  Yet, it serves the exact function I created the wish email account in the first placegive you a place to give us feedback.  Long story short, theres this great feedback site at http://feedback.live.com

Cheers,
Kent

Updated Post (posted on March 4, 2009):

Several keen observers sent email to me about my newly established livewish email address gently reminding me of an already established communication vehicle to get feedback to the Windows Live team. 

The official and preferred feedback mechanism to connect with and give ideas to the Windows Live teams is via: https://feedback.live.com/default.aspx

Mea culpa.  The feedback.live.com system does a terrific job and I was remiss in not pointing it out in my original post.  I still believe in frictionless communication so the email address will still be active but you should only use it as a last resort (e.g. youre at 30K feet on a non-WiFi connected airplane and just have to get your suggestion queued for us).  I simply wont be able to keep up with the emailed suggestions Ive been getting so the feedback site is a much better choice.

Its also worth noting, if you need support for any of the Windows Live services, please go to https://support.live.com/default.aspx and if you have Hotmail specific questions, go to http://windowslivehelp.com/Default.aspx  Ive mentioned it before but the official Windows Live team blog is http://windowslivewire.spaces.live.com/default.aspx

My original post below has been updated in a few places (denoted via the red font).  I never anticipated my simple blog post would get picked up so far and wide (I feel like Scoble <grin>).  THANK YOU to those of you who have already sent in your suggestions. 

Your humble planner,

Kent

Original Post (posted on March 3, 2009):

Most people feel it is too hard to give someone at Microsoft their feedback for how theyd like to see the products work.  I know I felt that too when I was a non-Microsoft employee (and I still feel that way as a consumer of other companys goods and services).  I believe this has changed for the better in recent years with the proliferation of blogs (which allow comments), Help | Send Feedback (for Windows Live products), etc. 

My goal as a product planner is to remove any interference/resistance between the great ideas you have and our ability as the product group to implement them. 

Invariably, after a company puts in place a feedback system there are a few people who say why should I give my ideas to company x just so they can make money from them.  They have a valid point, and for those people who have the inclination and talent to write software, maintain it, support it, globalize it, etc. I encourage them to get codingthe world needs more great software developers and applications.  However, the feedback we want as a product group is much more granular, think feature-level or simplifying the steps it takes to get x done, not ideas for an entirely new product.

If you have an idea that you think would make, for example, Windows Live Mail, work better please submit the idea to http://feedback.live.com   If you send email to the following email address youll receive an auto-reply email asking you to submit your ideas via the feedback web site.   

Im sorry for the image.  Its a hack to lower the likelihood of spam bots easily obtaining the actual email address.  I chose this email address because its easy to remember and it allows several of us (starting with me) to read the email and then forward the email onto the appropriate planner in Windows Live.   However, the email addresss backend process (me!) simply wont scale to meet the number of suggestions its receiving. 

Please understand, that we receive numerous ideas just because youve sent your suggestion doesnt mean it will make it into the product in question in the next version, or the version after that, or the version after that version.  This is due to a process called prioritization where the releases theme, overall usefulness in lieu of another feature is determined (since resources such as developers and their time are finite), a target audience is defined (a power user feature versus an average user feature), etc.  

Were always looking for ideas that impact a wide swath of people and with great frequency.   AutoCorrect is one of the greatest features that positively impacts hundreds of millions of users each day that we probably get enough credit for.  In fact, I wish that Windows Live Writer (and lots of our other apps) supported AutoCorrect because while I type fast I have an incredible knack for mistyping or misspelling the same words over and over.  Thats a feature idea that Id like to see be implemented in more of the Windows Live Essentials products. 

Long story short, were listening (even if it via https and not as much via SMTP :-) )

Thank you for using Windows Live.

Gadgets seem to one of those things in computers that polarize people.  Gadgets, in the Windows world, are little pieces of code, jscript and/or XML (depending on the gadget) that sits primarily in the Sidebar in Vista and anywhere on the desktop in Windows 7.  Some people rely on them heavily while others disdain them for taking up memory, processor or hard drive I/Os.  I am in the former campI rely on them to tell me how my computer is performing, what the weather is, which appointments I have coming up and as a way to look up references.  

I add the following gadgets to all of my computers: Digital Dutch Clock, MSN Weather, Multi Meter, HDD Meter or Multimeter,  Outlook Appointments, and Wikipedia.  Two of those gadgetsthe Digital Dutch Clock and MSN Weatherreplace the gadgets that come with Windows.   I like the DDC because it shows additional info that Windows default clock gadget doesnt have (see below).  Jan, DDCs developer, was kind enough to rev his gadget for Windows 7 when I sent him email letting him know that the previous version wasnt properly rendering.  I love the developer community and am especially appreciative of Jan turning around the update so quickly (3 weeks!). 

I like the MSN Weather gadget because it has a small profile:

that can be flown-out to a 3-day forecast simply by clicking on it: 

Windows default gadget has a 3-day profile too but its either in the small state or the large state, not both.  For example, you can undock the default gadget from Vistas Sidebar to get it to show the 3-day forecast; however, clicking on anything but the City, State (which launches a web site) doesnt do anything.

The real downside with some gadgets is that, like any app, they can leak memory.  Fortunately, logging out and logging back in resets them to a baseline.   I hope that someday Ill be able to tell which gadget is leaking memory and work with the developer to fix it or simply turn it off.  I dont have the time to turn them off individually and wait a couple of days.

BTW, Windows 7 is a great OS.  It takes all of Vistas strengths and enhances them and its challenges and minimizes or eliminates them.  For now, thatll have to wait to be another post or you can go to someone elses blog like the Windows 7 team

The gold version of the Windows Live Essentials applications (e.g. Mail, Photo Gallery, Writer--which Im using to write this blog, the Outlook Connector, etc.) are available now at http://download.live.com  This final version was in beta when I joined the WL team a couple of months ago.  Anyone who is running the version that came out ~12 months ago will really enjoy the added functionality and integration.  

My personal favorite is Windows Live Photo Gallery because my family has 40K+ photos.  WLPG makes it super easy to organize, categorize, and do minor edits (e.g. fix red-eye) on photos.  If you use Windows Live Messenger, Facebook, LinkedIn and a number of other cloud services youll probably appreciate the ease at which you can tag photos that include people.  

Oh, and did I mention that Windows Live Essentials is free?  Dont take my word, you be the judge.

Enjoy!  

After 3.5 years as the product planner for Windows Essential Business Server, today I began a new job in the Windows Live Experience team.   I will be one of the desktop communications product planners which basically means Ill be contributing to cool, big market products like Windows Live Communicator, Windows Live Mail (which is one of the premier clients for Hotmail) and one of my personal favorites, the Outlook Connector.  If you are not familiar with Windows Live I encourage you to visit www.windowslive.com.  The new Wave 3 version is getting incredible reviews and deservedly so.

While Ill greatly miss all of the people I met while I was gathering research on Midsize Businesses my new job gives me a chance to contribute on a product that literally is used by hundreds of millions of people around the world.  To paraphrase David Bowie having that many customers fits into category of Under pressure

Ill be hanging out in the newsgroups looking for feedback but if you have suggestions for me as it pertains to my new job, fire away. 

Cheers

After 3.5 years of development, I am happy to announce that we have released Essential Business Server 2008 to manufacturing (aka RTMed)!  I have seen the product come along way in that time and am very proud of the work the team has put into EBS. 

I have been meeting with customers these past two weeks (and will be again in the next couple of weeks) and I can say with great certainty that all of our research, planning and customer connections has paid off very well.  Although I dont like hearing about the struggles that IT Administrators have with their IT today, its nice to know that EBS 2008 will help with many of those issues. 

EBS 2008 reduces the pain of installation and migration, turns unmonitored environments in managed ones, deploys patches and software, gives the business world-class remote access out of the box, enables the IT Administrator to easily setup Windows SharePoint Services as an intranet, and finally integrates with numerous 3rd party (not in our box) programs.

November 12 is the REAL big daythats when the product is officially launched and will be generally available to purchase. 

Finally, when your friends ask about Essential Business Server just point them to http://www.microsoft.com/ebs

It was a big day for the product group.  We signed off on Windows Essential Business Server release candidate 1 today!  It will be available on Connect and the Public Preview will be refreshed very soon.

I cant wait until we RTM (release to manufacturing) and then EBS is made available broadly so Midsize organization IT Administrators and our partners can experience all of the hard work.  

RTM is just around the corner!