Office team releases new Outlook Hotmail Connector

Hello, I'm Alessio Roic from Microsoft Outlook, guest-blogging here today to make an important announcement. After several months of beta testing, Microsoft Outlook Hotmail Connector 14.0 has officially been released!

Why use Outlook Hotmail Connector?

If you have been using Outlook Connector 12.1, you already know that it allows you to manage your Windows Live Hotmail e-mail, calendar, and contacts from within Outlook. Outlook Hotmail Connector 14.0 introduces several improvements. For example, you might notice after upgrading that the connection to Hotmail is more reliable than before, and issues such as blank messages being synchronized to Outlook have been fixed.

It's even better with Outlook 2010

Outlook Hotmail Connector 14.0 is compatible with Outlook 2003, 2007 and 2010. However, with Outlook Hotmail Connector 14.0 and Outlook 2010 (beta), you'll see these additional benefits:

• Junk filter settings. Your safe sender, blocked sender, and safe recipient lists are synchronized between Outlook and Hotmail.
• Integrated Send/Receive. Send/receive works just as it does for your other Outlook accounts.
• Integrated connection status. The Hotmail account status appears in the Outlook status bar.
• Rule support for secondary accounts. Rules can be applied to your Hotmail account in Outlook, even if it is not your primary Outlook account.
• Sync your drafts. The Outlook Drafts folder synchronizes with the Hotmail Drafts folder.

Trouble upgrading?

We've seen reports of problems that some users of Outlook Connector 12.1 have encountered when prompted to auto-upgrade to the latest version of Outlook Hotmail Connector. As a result, we have temporarily turned off these auto-upgrade prompts. You can still manually install Outlook Hotmail Connector 14 by going to the download site, or you can continue using Outlook Connector 12.1 — in both cases, Outlook successfully synchronizes with your Windows Live Hotmail inbox.

On behalf of the entire Outlook Hotmail Connector team, thanks for trying the new Outlook Hotmail Connector 14.

For more info on how to download or upgrade to Outlook Connector 14, please see my latest blog post on the Outlook blog.

Alessio Roic

Senior Program Manager, Microsoft Outlook
http://blogs.msdn.com/outlook/