We’ve received many comments and tweets about how people use SkyDrive everyday to access, create, and share across devices. In this post, Lia Yu , a product marketer on our team, shares a few of our favorite tips.        - Anand Babu, Group Product Marketer, SkyDrive...

In just over 100 days since Office Web Apps launched , more than 20 million people in the U.S., U.K., Canada, and Ireland have used them – including Hotmail , Office 2010 , and SkyDrive . With more than 25,000 comments so far, we're releasing more new features today, shaped directly by your feedback...

We’ve talked about our approach to connecting the file cloud, app cloud and device cloud. A key part of the work we are doing in the app cloud is to bring the benefits of cloud-based file sharing to email apps. In this post, Lia Yu, a product marketer on the SkyDrive team, describes the problems people...

When you want to get in touch with someone, where do you look? There are lots of places that people store their contact data - the address book for their email account, their Instant Message buddy list, Facebook, LinkedIn, their phone…. When you find that person you want to reach out to, is their information...

A few weeks ago, we released an upgrade to SkyDrive.com that fundamentally changed the way you can share files and collaborate using SkyDrive. Omar Shahine gave a great overview in his blog post a couple of weeks ago, but I wanted to dive into deeper detail about how our new, simple app-centric sharing...

Hotmail's fight against spam has certainly come a long way in the last five years. Over the last several years we've made substantial investments in the research and development of sophisticated anti-spam technologies. SmartScreen is the collective name we use for a cloud-based set of technologies and...

Now that the new generation of Windows Live web services has been released, some of you have asked me why we didn’t make any changes to Spaces. Although we did not make many noticeable changes to the service, I wanted to do a blog post about Spaces within the broader context of Windows Live and show...

In our last update , we used HTML5 to make SkyDrive faster for browsing and accessing your files from anywhere, on any browser. But we know that many of you want to do more than just store documents on SkyDrive - you also want to share and collaborate. Today, I’m thrilled to join the Office team in announcing...

I wanted to talk about a new user safety feature we just introduced in Wave 4: SmartScreen for URLs This safety feature is another step Windows Live is taking to protect you from socially engineered attacks and account abuse. This abuse is an industry-wide problem, and we've seen a significant uptick...

We think it’s critical that our customers can use Hotmail from any device they choose. So, in addition to making Hotmail work great on devices running Windows, we’ll continue to invest in great experiences on other major device platforms. The recent release of iOS5 and our Hotmail application for Android...

October 22 marks one year since the release of Windows 7. This is a huge milestone for Windows and for Microsoft. Windows 7 has already sold 240 million copies, more than any other operating system in the same timeframe and helping bring us to 1.2 billion people using Windows worldwide . This is something...

We’ve kept ourselves busy this summer. A few months ago, we released a re-invented Windows Live Hotmail designed around what people said they wanted—a more efficient service to help them manage clutter with features like Sweep and one-click filters , save time with ActiveViews , share hundreds of large...

The Hotmail rollout continues to go along smoothly and we’re right on track with our release plan, having now upgraded nearly 50 million accounts on several different clusters. Of course, we continue to get comments from many of you who are eager to get access to the new Hotmail, and we’re just as eager...

What we set out to accomplish Talking to customers gives us great ideas about how to make Hotmail better . One of the things we hear about the most is inbox overload: folks want to find important emails quickly. Whether it’s an important back-and-forth conversation with friends or a YouTube video that...

Office Web Apps are now available to anyone using Hotmail or SkyDrive in Central and South America. This extends the service to people in 18 more countries: Argentina, Bolivia, Brazil, Chile, Colombia, Costa Rica, Dominican Republic, Ecuador, El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras, Nicaragua, Panama, Paraguay...

Starting today, you can create and manage multiple email aliases from a single Hotmail account. Together with features that we introduced in November that let you use Hotmail with any existing email address , the new aliasing feature makes it easy to use a different email address and still get all the...

As Piero mentioned in his blog post, we had two main goals when building the newest version of Windows Live: making everyday tasks simpler, and connecting Windows 7 to the cloud. In the new Windows Live Mail beta , we did a lot of work to make these goals a reality, and today I’d like to give you a quick...

Ever wonder how Hotmail stores the billions of email messages we receive each day? Keeping our customers’ data safe and readily available is an immense responsibility that we take very seriously. And to do so efficiently at our scale is a sizeable engineering challenge. This post will discuss how we...

The Office Web Apps have been refreshed on SkyDrive and in Hotmail with several new features, including: Word printing . Now, the Word Web App offers the print command in the Word Web App editor. Excel charts and the auto fill handle . With the Excel Web App, you can easily insert charts and manipulate...

Over the past few weeks, we've announced many new features coming in Windows Live Messenger. By now you've probably played with the Beta, and if you haven't, you can get it now at http://explore.live.com . You can also see how Messenger goes with you wherever you are -- on the new Hotmail or even using...

In just 5 days, over one million people downloaded the Windows Live Messenger app for iPhone that launched last week !  This early momentum is fantastic, and we really appreciate the feedback we’ve been getting from many of you.  We look forward to updating the iPhone app shortly to address...

Not too long ago, account hijacking was an issue limited mostly to financial service websites. Now the practice has grown to threaten other web services like email, disrupting millions of accounts every year. When an email account is compromised by hijackers, it violates the privacy of the account owner...

We announced last week a new version of SkyDrive , in which SkyDrive was redesigned from the ground up to have great performance on modern browsers. Like the SkyDrive team, we’ve also been hard at work on ways to speed up Hotmail . We measured how fast our Hotmail pages loaded all over the world and...

Beginning today, Hotmail is providing you with the option to enhance the security of your entire Hotmail session with HTTPS data encryption (via secure socket layers, or SSL), which is currently used to help secure your Hotmail sign-in. Today’s update joins a series of other recent security updates ...

ZDNet’s Ed Bott penned a very thorough comparison of Photo Gallery 2011 and iPhoto ‘11 in The Ed Bott Report this past week. While he doesn’t go so far as to declare a winner, he highlights some clear advantages to our design approach. In a lot of ways, his experience and analysis reflects what we set...