Inside Windows Live

The next chapter for the Windows Live Messenger network

Brian Hall — Tue, 06 Nov 2012 18:08:00 GMT

More than 12 years ago we released the first version of Messenger to help people chat and keep in touch online in a more personal way. One of the unique things about IM and Messenger in particular is that it has always been about the network of people far more than any one “app.” Almost every one of us joined the Messenger network to be with the people who were on the network – to chat, share stories, laugh, gossip, and just be together. Messenger enabled each of us to communicate and share with the people we care about.

A lot has changed for IM and Messenger. We started to text more on our phones, to broadcast messages on Facebook and Twitter, and Skype became the best way to have video and voice calls (in addition to also letting you IM).

Recently, we added the ability to sign in to Skype using a Microsoft account, the same account you use for Messenger, Hotmail, Outlook.com, and more, bringing your contacts to Skype automatically. This makes Skype fantastic for connecting with that network of people you know and love.

Today, we’ve announced on the Skype blog that we are now encouraging all Messenger users to update by downloading the latest version of Skype. In the coming months, we will retire the Messenger apps for all regions worldwide except for mainland China.

Many of us use and love Messenger today – but it’s always been about the people that make up Messenger – not the app itself. We’re confident that Skype provides a better experience and even stronger network – today and even more so in the future, especially with the addition of the Messenger network.

And most importantly, because more of the people you care about will be on Skype, you can connect in richer ways, and you can be connected on more devices and platforms. We will enable Skype to work better with Outlook.com than Messenger ever has too.

Chris Jones laid out our plans for reimagining cloud services for Windows and Windows Phone in May. Since then we’ve made major updates to SkyDrive, released Outlook.com, Windows 8, the new Office, and Windows Phone 8 – all powered by a single Microsoft account – and today, we've announced the future for Messenger and Skype.

This will be the final post on “Inside Windows Live.” It’s been quite a journey, and we’re excited about a future of amazing devices and services!

Brian Hall

Experiencing modern Office with SkyDrive: Cloud-first. No compromises.

Omar Shahine — Fri, 20 Jul 2012 17:33:00 GMT

Last November, we shared our thoughts on the state of personal cloud storage and our vision for connecting file, app and device clouds to address key customer problems. For example, students start and finish projects in Microsoft Office, but that 75% of them use other tools in between, such as email, Google Docs, and Dropbox. Using these different tools can lead to formatting loss, extra steps and versions, or just confusion, since each tool has its own limitations.

It’s been nine months since we shared our vision. Yet we know many of you are still struggling with these problems – or worse, you’re forced to compromise and use lesser tools.

Announced earlier this week, the new Office puts an end to that. It connects naturally to the cloud – giving you automatic access to personal documents from any device and the ability to easily share and create together with anyone – right from Word, Excel, or PowerPoint. (There’s also a new version of SkyDrive designed for organizations. Employees can now get the benefits of SkyDrive for work documents while administrators get the management and compliance features they need.)

And today, we’re excited to announce the new Office Web Apps for SkyDrive customers. Available as an opt-in preview, this is the most significant update we have ever released. The new Web Apps offer a great new look, improved performance, and many new features.

Here’s how to start experiencing a modern Office with SkyDrive today:

Install Office 365 Home Premium Preview

The install takes just a few minutes and you can:

Save documents to SkyDrive automatically
Office installs SkyDrive for the Windows desktop so new documents are automatically saved privately and safely to the cloud. Your documents are all stored offline on your PC allowing you to work anywhere, any time, on any doc.
Share using SkyDrive without leaving the app
From Word, Excel, and PowerPoint, you can share any document using SkyDrive. This includes sharing to any email address in your Microsoft account address book (including your Google, LinkedIn, and Hotmail contacts), getting a view or view & edit link, or posting to a social network connected to your Microsoft account (Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn).
Work together in real time
Edit documents or presentations in real time without ever leaving Word or PowerPoint. You can also collaborate with others using Office 2010 or Office 2011.

Opt in to Office Web Apps Preview

Get improved authoring right in your browser
While many people enjoyed the convenience of using the Office Web Apps in a browser, they missed functionality that they were used to in desktop Office. With this release you can now create more professional looking documents and we implemented many top customer requests.
Touch support
Office Web Apps now work with more browsers and devices. They include a new touch-friendly user interface so you can work on your documents on devices like Windows 8 tablets or modern smartphones.
Work together with anyone
You can now work together at the same time as others in all four Office Web Apps (Word, Excel, PowerPoint, and OneNote).

We encourage you to visit the Office Next blog for details about all of the features including screenshots.

This is a big week for SkyDrive and Office. Please try out the new features, share with friends, and give us your feedback via Twitter or by clicking the smiley face in the products. We’re listening.

Omar Shahine
Group Program Manager, SkyDrive.com

Keeping your Microsoft account more secure

Eric Doerr — Sun, 15 Jul 2012 17:58:00 GMT

Increasingly, it seems like you can’t read the news without seeing a headline about a security issue exposing customer account information for criminals to exploit.

As a guy who works every day to keep the Microsoft account system (formerly Windows Live ID) secure, each time I read something like this my heart goes out first to the people whose accounts are victimized by these criminals, and secondly to my colleagues at the compromised companies. Bad guys only have to be right once, defenders have to be right 100% of the time – and I’ve been impressed by the competence and dedication of my peers across the industry.

Of course, as has been extensively covered, these attacks shine a spotlight on the core issue – people reuse passwords between different websites. This highlights the longstanding security advice to use unique passwords, as criminals have become increasingly sophisticated about taking a list of usernames and passwords from one service and then “replaying” that list against other major account systems. When they find matching passwords they are able to spread their abuse beyond the original account system they attacked.

We don’t blog much about our security work – no need to give the bad guys more ideas on how to attack our customers. However, given the events of this past week, we’ve had enough questions that I wanted to take the time to share at a high level how we protect our customers from these attacks, and re-emphasize what each of you can do to better protect yourself.

Many sources of leaked credentials

Let’s start with how we find out about these customers who are at risk.

We regularly get notified of lists of compromised external account info (email addresses and/or passwords from other networks) from different sources. They contact us so that we can make sure our customers are protected if they use the same password for their Microsoft account. Sometimes it’s one of the many worldwide law enforcement agencies who reaches out. Sometimes it’s an ISP. Sometimes it’s another company who runs an identity system. And occasionally lists are published on public websites for the world to see.

The amount of detail and fidelity of these lists of customers varies – often these are incomplete or encrypted lists that don’t put real customers at risk. But occasionally they are lists of complete usernames and passwords that are a real threat to our customers.

How we protect our customers

When we get a list, first, we check to see if it actually matches any accounts and passwords in our system. This is done in an automated and secure way so no human actually sees the account info of our customers.

You’d be surprised how often the lists – especially the publicly posted ones – are complete garbage with zero matches. But sometimes there are hits – on average, we see successful password matches of around 20% of matching usernames. A recent one only had 4.5% overlap. This is actually exciting because it means that, on average, 80% of our customers are following safe password practices, and this reflects a growing sophistication in our customers.

Next, we look to see if there is evidence of criminal activity, like sending spam. If we do see signs of criminal activity, we suspend the account and ask the rightful owner to go through account recovery to regain control. In other cases we simply ask the customer to change their password (before any harm can be done).

Occasionally we get information about a set of customers, but there isn’t enough account information to identify who has reused passwords and is therefore at risk. Then we have a judgment call – do we ask 100% of those customers to reset their passwords, even though only 20% are probably at risk? Or do we leave the 20% at risk to avoid inconveniencing the 80%?

Where there is a credible threat, the answer is simple – we err on the side of protecting customers. This is a drag for those of you who are very careful with your passwords, and I do apologize for that inconvenience, but I hope you forgive us for protecting your neighbor. It might be you some day.

If your account is ever on one of these lists, here’s what you will see when you next sign in to Hotmail, SkyDrive, Xbox or another Microsoft service with your Microsoft account. (You might also see something like this if you have a password that is too common).

When you see this, please pardon the inconvenience and take a moment to change your password to a new, unique password.

How you can protect yourself

Follow the simple steps below to better protect yourself from criminals looking to take advantage of you.

Always choose strong, unique passwords. Here’s how.
Add security proofs to your account, and check them regularly to ensure they are up to date. You can add a phone, email address, or trusted PC as a proof, and these are used to recover your account if you ever lose access. Here’s how.
Be careful using your account in public places, and especially on shared PCs. Shared PCs like those in hotels and Internet cafes are notoriously insecure, and often have malicious software installed that will steal your password. If you have to use one, sign in with a single-use code instead of your normal password. Here’s how.
Be careful sharing personal information – passwords, email addresses, physical addresses, credit card info – these pieces of info can all be used to attempt to access your account.
Install protection against viruses, spyware, and malware on your computer, and keep it up to date. There are many excellent choices available, including Microsoft Security Essentials, which is free.
Make sure your browser phishing filters are active. For IE, click the Tools icon on the toolbar, point to Safety, and then click Turn on SmartScreen Filter. For other browsers, check your help files for instructions.
Ensure you are on the correct site before entering personal info. Beware of websites that seem too good to be true (offering amazing deals) and always check the address bar to ensure it’s the right URL.

Also remember that we will never send you email asking for your password or other security or account information. Any email asking for this information is always a phishing scam designed to lure you into disclosing your password or other account information.

As a final note, of course we have security systems that are constantly evolving to block unauthorized access to your account even if the attacker has your password. These systems reason about normal patterns of login, location, and other factors, and will block unauthorized access or at times will provide an additional identity challenge to make sure that you are really you. But criminals do sometimes get around these systems, so having good, strong, unique passwords and following our security tips is always a good idea.

Thanks for helping us keep you safe.

Eric Doerr
Group Program Manager – Microsoft account

Update to the SkyDrive desktop app for Windows

Mike Torres — Thu, 12 Jul 2012 18:18:00 GMT

Today, many SkyDrive users may notice an automatic update to SkyDrive for Windows (Version 16.4.6003.0710).

Most of the changes in this update aren't really visible. Millions of people depend on SkyDrive to automatically sync files, so as with most updates, this one improves performance, reliability, and compatibility of SkyDrive.

However, there are a couple things you might notice in this update:

New status window

Many people asked for a simple way to check at a glance whether their SkyDrive is in sync. With this update, when you click SkyDrive in the system tray, a small status window appears. It lets you know if SkyDrive is up to date, and gives you the time at which SkyDrive was last updated.

If SkyDrive is still syncing, you'll also see the number of megabytes and files you have remaining to sync.

We’ve also added new options in the context menu that you see when you right-click (“View sync problems” and “Report a problem”) to make it easier to identify and report issues.

New SkyDrive logo

We designed SkyDrive to provide Windows customers access to important files anywhere. With the upcoming release of Windows 8, the time was right to redesign the SkyDrive logo. The refreshed logo is a natural evolution of the work we’re doing across Microsoft to deliver a more consistent experience across all of our products.

As we update SkyDrive for other platforms, apps, and devices, you'll see the updated logo appear more broadly. We will also be making it available to partners and developers.

We hope you enjoy the update, and we look forward to your continued feedback.

Mike Torres

9 tips for working with SkyDrive on Windows PCs

Anand Babu — Fri, 15 Jun 2012 18:28:10 GMT

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

When you install the free SkyDrive app on your computer, you can access your photos and files from almost anywhere, store them, and securely share them. And with the arrival of Windows 8 Release Preview, SkyDrive is automatically available right on the Start screen and any of your Windows 8 apps can connect directly to SkyDrive. We’ve had SkyDrive on our Windows PCs for some time now and wanted to share some of our favorite tips on ways to use it.

1. Access SkyDrive easily from any Windows 8 app

In addition to browsing and managing your files directly using the SkyDrive app, you can also use other Windows 8 apps to choose a file or save files to SkyDrive.

For instance, to choose a lock screen or a picture password, you can select from photos on your SkyDrive, right from the file browser. Just choose SkyDrive from the dropdown list of file locations and select a picture.

Or, if you’re using an app like SketchBook, the sketches you create can be saved directly to SkyDrive, right from the app. Again, just choose SkyDrive in the dropdown list of file locations.

2. Fetch Photos from another device

For those of you already using Windows 8 Release Preview, you can quickly “fetch” a photo from another PC, right in the Photos app. The ability to fetch a photo is enabled the same way as fetching a file from SkyDrive.com. All you need is the SkyDrive app installed on the PC you want to fetch photos from and an internet connection. The Photos app in Windows 8 Release Preview will automatically populate the PCs you have enabled fetch for, so you can easily begin browsing the photos on all those devices.

3. Organize your files on SkyDrive

If you’ve used SkyDrive for a while, you may have created a lot of folders that aren’t very well organized. You might consider taking this opportunity to organize your SkyDrive, which is especially easy now that you can more drag and drop within the SkyDrive folder on your Windows PC. And even if you’ve shared some of these files and folders, with the SkyDrive sharing update last year, you can almost always do this without “breaking” the sharing access for others.

There are a few things to keep in mind as you do this. Apps like Office and devices like your Windows Phone are designed to work with “special” folders in your SkyDrive. These folders include Documents, Pictures, Public, Mobile uploads, Blog images, SkyDrive camera roll, Twitter uploads, and BitLocker. If you delete or rename these folders, SkyDrive will automatically recreate them to ensure these apps or devices can keep working. Of course you can still move around folders or files that are within these special folders.

4. Add SkyDrive to your Windows libraries for easier access

SkyDrive is designed to be simple yet powerful. With a single SkyDrive folder, there are many options to personalize the experience. If you want to view your SkyDrive files alongside your other Documents and Pictures, add the Documents or Pictures subfolders in your SkyDrive to the respective libraries in Windows 7 (or Windows 8).

This can be particularly convenient if you use apps like Photo Gallery or Office that show files from certain libraries by default. It’s also another reason to keep your SkyDrive organized.

5. Make SkyDrive your “primary” drive

If you want to go cloud-first and treat SkyDrive as your primary location for personal files, then set the default save location in your libraries to your SkyDrive folders. You can even go all the way and remove any other local folders from your libraries.

6. Redirect your Desktop to SkyDrive

Often we leave “work in progress” files on our desktop. When moving between PCs, it can be easy to forget these important files. Solve this by redirecting the desktop on your PCs to a folder on SkyDrive. Right click on Desktop in your user folder and select properties. Then change the location for the Desktop to the folder of your choice on SkyDrive.

7. Add OneNote notebooks to SkyDrive

If you already use OneNote with SkyDrive, you may notice that your notebooks show up in your SkyDrive folder as shortcuts – not actual files. This is because of the unique way that OneNote works with SkyDrive to enable special features such as co-authoring.

If you want to add OneNote notebooks currently stored only on your PC to SkyDrive, open OneNote 2010, click File, then Share, then scroll to Share On. Select Web, then in Web Location, choose SkyDrive. After that, you can view or edit notebooks on the web. Also if you are on a PC (or Mac) without OneNote 2010, you can access your notebook by clicking the respective shortcut in your SkyDrive folder as access your OneNote notebooks from the web.

8. Work together on Office docs

If you plan to work together with someone else on a document using Word 2010 or 2011, PowerPoint 2010 or 2011, or Office Web Apps, open the file directly from SkyDrive.com, not from your SkyDrive folder. This lets you and your friends work on the “live” version of the document so that you can work simultaneously without creating versioning issues.

9. Get easier access to shared folders and sharing options

In the preview release of SkyDrive for Windows (and Mac), you can view your personal files in Explorer (or Finder). To view files shared with you or files in your groups, visit SkyDrive.com or use the SkyDrive app for Windows 8. For quick access to SkyDrive.com, pin it to your taskbar using IE.

You can also customize your taskbar to always show the SkyDrive system tray icon. Then you can right-click SkyDrive in the system tray and select “Go to SkyDrive.com”.

With SkyDrive in the system tray, you can also easily check whether syncing is complete. A green line will slide across the bottom of the icon if SkyDrive is still syncing and disappear when it’s done.

So that’s a pretty quick roundup of some of our favorite tips on SkyDrive. We find SkyDrive incredibly useful, and we’re sure some of you do too. We’re guessing that some of you have some tips of your own. Feel free to share feedback and your own tips in the comments. Thanks!

Updates to the SkyDrive apps for Windows and Mac

Mike Torres — Wed, 30 May 2012 17:23:00 GMT

Last month we released preview versions of SkyDrive for Windows and OS X Lion, along with big updates to our iOS and Windows Phone apps. We also announced a new, more flexible approach to personal cloud storage that allows power users to get additional paid storage up to 100GB.

It’s been an incredible month since! Our goal was to build a cloud that seamlessly connects your files to the apps and devices you use every day, and we’ve been thrilled with the response so far. In just a few weeks, more people were using SkyDrive apps than have used Mesh. People using SkyDrive for Windows or Mac are now our most engaged users – syncing files across several devices, sharing with SkyDrive.com, and working together with Office Web Apps. At the same time, we continue to listen and respond to your feedback across forums, blogs, Twitter, and Facebook.

We recently rolled out an update to the SkyDrive app for Windows Phone that fixed a few minor bugs, and we have a small bug-fix-only update to our iOS app on the way as well. Today we’re also starting to push updates to the SkyDrive apps for Windows desktop and for Mac, which will appear automatically on your PC or Mac over the course of the next week or so. You don’t need to do anything, as the updates occur automatically in the background.

Here are a few of the improvements and fixes in the updates:

SkyDrive for Windows desktop will power a cool new feature in the upcoming Windows 8 Release Preview, available the first week of June. Right from the Photos app in Windows 8, you can fetch photos stored on your other PCs that have SkyDrive installed – no matter where you are or how many terabytes of photos you have stored on the PC you are accessing. We’ll have more to say about this shortly, so stay tuned.
SkyDrive for OS X Lion no longer shows an app icon in the dock when running. We’ve definitely heard the feedback that it wasn’t necessary.
Your SkyDrive folder now updates more quickly and reliably when changes are made on other devices, including SkyDrive.com.
The limit on the number of total files in the SkyDrive folder created by the apps has been raised from 150,000 to a whopping 10 million! This should unblock some power users from easily adding lots of files to their SkyDrive folder.
We made lots of smaller bug fixes to improve overall reliability.

Our primary goal throughout this preview period for our desktop apps is to really nail the fundamentals. This means we want the synchronization process to be fast and dependable, and for your SkyDrive folder to “just work,” so that it simply feels like magic.

By the way, if you’d like to see if you’re running the latest build, you can see the build number by clicking Settings (in Windows, this is in the right-click menu for the SkyDrive system tray icon, and on the Mac, it’s on the application menu) and then About. The build number to look for is 16.4.4111.0525. But again, if you’re still running an older build (if the last four numbers are lower than 0525), there’s nothing you need to do. You'll get the update automatically in the next week or so, provided the SkyDrive app is running.

Thanks for all of your support and great feedback over the last month!

Mike Torres
Group Program Manager, SkyDrive Apps

Shorter, more useful links with SDRV.MS

Omar Shahine — Thu, 17 May 2012 18:15:00 GMT

If you’re like most people, when you share files via SkyDrive you typically do so directly via email. This is one reason we built the connected address book, bringing together your friends’ addresses across Facebook, Google, and LinkedIn. Another benefit: when you share photos via email, your friends get a beautiful email with thumbnail previews.

Back in December, we added another way to share. You can get a link to any file or folder on SkyDrive and send that link to friends. You can choose to let friends edit or add files, or choose to make the link read-only. Since then, SkyDrive users have created over 13 million links—copying and pasting them into their favorite apps or services.

While this feature has been popular, we’ve also gotten a lot of feedback that our links are too long and too ugly. We agree!

Sharing with links just got a bit friendlier:

We’ve shortened our regular URLs by 40%. Our previous URLs didn’t even fit inside a Tweet! Oh the shame!
You can shorten them even further thanks to our new partnership with bitly and the new domain for shortened SkyDrive URLs: http://sdrv.ms
We’ve added OpenGraph support to our URLs so that when you paste them into places like Facebook, a nice thumbnail preview gets generated

Shorter links

As you can see in the Share dialog, there is a Shorten button

Shortening using our own custom domain

Clicking the button will result in a very short URL using the SDRV.MS domain

Support for OpenGraph for link previews

If you copy that URL to Facebook you’ll see a nicer preview

Stats on your short links

Since bitly powers the shortener, you also get great power features. For example, you can add a ‘+’ to the end of any short URL to see statistics. You can also generate a QR code for that URL by appending ’.qrcode’ to that URL.

We hope you enjoy these changes, and thanks for using SkyDrive!

Omar Shahine
Group Program Manager, SkyDrive.com

Six Tips to Make SkyDrive your Cloud Backpack

Anand Babu — Thu, 10 May 2012 16:00:00 GMT

Earlier this year, we shared a few tips for students to work together with SkyDrive and Office on important projects—without compromising formatting or features. We heard great feedback and we look forward to sharing winners from our Collaboration Challenge soon!

Increasingly, we see students and teachers use services like SkyDrive to store everything in one place for easy sharing and access anywhere on campus. We call this your “cloud backpack”. In this post, Mark Grimaldi on the SkyDrive product marketing team will share a few tips to use SkyDrive this way.

- Anand Babu, Group Product Marketer, SkyDrive

If you’re a student, it’s the same routine every day. You gather everything you need—your notebook for class, binder full of handouts, readings or homework assignments, textbooks, laptop, smartphone and maybe even your tablet. And of course your power adapters. Then you stuff it all into your backpack—everything you think you might need throughout the day—because you may not be back home until it’s time for bed.

Surely, there must be a better way to have everything you might need without hauling it around with you everywhere you go.

Well, there is. With SkyDrive, you get a “cloud backpack” where you can store, create and access all of your documents, notes, photos or files from anywhere. Our new SkyDrive at School page shows how anyone can get started with a cloud backpack, but we wanted to share a few extra tips to help you go “all in.”

Tip #1: Upgrade your notebook and put it in the cloud

OneNote 2010 is a powerful note-taking application that’s great for school. With OneNote, you can organize your notes by your classes, instantly search through them, draw graphs or diagrams, and even record your lectures. If you’re not using OneNote yet, check out these tips on the OneNote Blog to get started.

To make OneNote even more useful for you, connect it to SkyDrive and try these suggestions:

Study from anywhere

By saving your notebook on SkyDrive, you can access it from any computer (even a Mac!) using the OneNote Web App. You can also study on-the-go since OneNote is also available on pretty much every mobile device.

To save your OneNote notebook to SkyDrive, just click File and then Share to save it on the web.

Copy things to OneNote

Whether for class or a research project, you can send printouts, screenshots or web clippings right to OneNote to stay organized.

Find a helpful website for your research paper? Just highlight what you want from Internet Explorer and right click Send to OneNote 2010 to insert it into your notebook. You can send a whole webpage, a paragraph or image. OneNote will even show where you copied the content from so you can easily cite and reference it later.

Have a PDF or some other file from your professor? You can Print directly to your OneNote notebook and save it next to your notes from the same lecture.

To take a snapshot of anything on your screen, press Windows + S on your keyboard. You can also drop and drag an entire file into OneNote from your desktop.

By default, OneNote always asks where you want new notes to go. You can set a default preference by clicking File, Options, and then Send to OneNote. If you select a notebook that’s synced to SkyDrive, you can rest assured that anything you send to OneNote will be available anywhere, automatically.

Share your notes with classmates without a photocopier

With all of your notes in the cloud, you can easily share them with your friends and classmates. From SkyDrive.com, just right click your notebook and select Share.

If you want, you can even give them access to your notebook so that they can add their own notes. Now everyone can work together in the same notebook, and studying for finals just got a little easier.

Tip #2: Never be without your important files

Odds are, you’re either working on an important project right now or will be shortly. Well, SkyDrive can help keep you more organized and make sure that you’re never without the files that you need.

When you install SkyDrive for Windows or Mac, you get a SkyDrive folder on your computer. Everything you save or copy there is automatically synced to your SkyDrive. So move your spreadsheets, downloaded articles, and everything else you’ve gathered. No matter what happens to your computer, you can easily get to your stuff from any web browser.

Tip #3: Work with Office anywhere

SkyDrive does more than store your files. It also works with free Office Web Apps so you can view, edit and print from any web browser.

If you’re working on a Word document on your laptop at the library and your battery dies, you can easily pick up right where you left off just by logging into SkyDrive.com at the computer lab. If you get inspired on the bus ride back home, you can update your document using the Office Hub on your Windows Phone. You can rest assured that your formatting remains intact.

Any changes you make will be waiting to sync when you plug in your computer back at your dorm room.

What’s more, SkyDrive also keeps track of the various versions of your Word, Excel and PowerPoint documents. So don’t worry about renaming your files V1, V2… V14a. Just work in the documents saved in your SkyDrive folder and SkyDrive will take care of the rest.

Tip #4: Never leave something at home again

You’ve been there before. You’re at the computer lab ready to print out your paper and you forgot your USB drive. Or you’re away from your computer and you realize you didn’t email your TA your homework assignment. Or maybe you’ve just met someone at a company you’d like to work for and you want to send them your résumé, but you won’t be home for hours.

These aren’t a problem anymore. Even if you forget to put something in your SkyDrive folder—or never thought you’d need it there—you can still access it from any computer. SkyDrive for Windows lets you fetch any file on your personal computer (as long as it’s online) from SkyDrive.com.

Once you find that paper to print, you can click Copy to SkyDrive and use Word Web App to view, print and share.

Tip #5: Scan papers to SkyDrive using your phone

From handouts to class readings, old notes or recent assignments, you have so much paper to carry around and keep organized. Why not scan and upload everything to SkyDrive?

Use a smartphone app like Handyscan for Windows Phone (shown below) or Docscan for iPhone to create PDF versions of all of your handouts, homework, or even lecture notes from your friends. You can save the files directly to SkyDrive and they’ll be synced across your devices.

If you want to do more – like add comments or keep scans alongside class notes, you can import PDFs and other files into OneNote.

Tip #6: Access files on the go

USB drives are easily left behind. Emailing yourself documents makes it easy to lose track of the latest version or crowds your inbox.

With SkyDrive, you can access everything, all around campus, from any web browser. You can also use the SkyDrive app for Windows Phone, iPhone and iPad, or Android apps—no matter where you are.

Bringing a cloud backpack to every student and teacher

While we hope these tips are helpful, we know it will take some time before everyone upgrades to a “cloud backpack”. Here are a few ways you can help:

If you are a teacher, share class materials or class notes directly using SkyDrive. You can also provide feedback on assignments and papers through shared documents.

If you are a developer, use our APIs to integrate SkyDrive into applications that students use and love.

And if you are a student, what tips did we miss? Let us know in the comments or on Twitter how you’re using a cloud backpack today. We can help spread the word!

Mark Grimaldi,
Product Marketing Manager, SkyDrive

An exciting few days for personal cloud storage – and SkyDrive

Anand Babu — Wed, 25 Apr 2012 22:41:00 GMT

This week, we’ve seen a welcome update from Dropbox, a new chapter for SkyDrive and the long awaited emergence of Google Nessie. Is it only Wednesday?

We’re very encouraged by the response we’ve received this week, and it’s hard not to be pretty happy when we hear positive feedback on all of the improvements we’ve made and the value we provide vs. other solutions. But the most exciting thing for us has been the response from our customers. We’ve been thrilled to hear from you on Twitter and blogs, and we’ve had an overwhelming number of downloads of SkyDrive across Windows 8, Windows 7, iOS and Mac. We're listening to your feedback for the future, and we’ll keep adding storage and bandwidth as fast as we can. Thank you!

What do comparison charts leave out?

With this week’s events, it can be fun and useful to compare features across services. We’ve seen these charts across the web, and of course we recently updated our own chart.

However these comparisons often neglect one thing. Is each provider actually trying to build similar experiences? As we look at the category, we see our approach with SkyDrive is increasingly unique.

We don’t think people want another file cloud to manage. They don't want an app cloud tied to one browser, social network or ad network. They don't want yet another proprietary device cloud. People want a cloud that seamlessly connects their files to the apps and devices they use every day.

Over a billion people rely on Office apps and their Windows devices every day to create, capture and share from anywhere. That’s why we’re building personal cloud storage for our customers that works seamlessly with Office and Windows.

Of course we know Office and Windows customers have other devices and use other apps. We want them to enjoy SkyDrive too, so we’re working to make it available anywhere – directly and in partnership with developers.

As we do all of this, there should be no doubt that our business model is aligned with your interests.

A few things to try today

So how exactly will SkyDrive let you work seamlessly with Office and Windows from anywhere? We thought we’d share a few things you can try today.

Word, Excel and PowerPoint: Work across web and desktop, online or offline - no conversions, no compromises

With SkyDrive for Windows and Mac, you can easily work with documents using the Office apps you love – Word, Excel and PowerPoint – from anywhere. Unlike other services, you can do this without converting between formats or compromising on features. Below is a short video to demonstrate along with a few tips for collaboration.
OneNote: Capture notes, voice clips, scans and more on the go. Access and search later

Over the years, people have called OneNote a hidden gem. Thankfully more people are discovering it with the launch of OneNote for Android, iPhone, iPad and Windows Phone. Use your phone to take notes, record voice clips, scan documents and sync them instantly to SkyDrive. Your stuff is pushed to OneNote 2010 on your PC where you can organize and search – even audio and images. You can share notebooks with your spouse, friends or teams who can use OneNote Web App - free.
Fetch files in Windows: Turn your PC into a private cloud to access any file, not just what’s in the cloud

Moving files to the cloud offers many advantages – particularly for sharing and collaboration. However, you shouldn’t have to upload everything just to access it anywhere. With “fetch”, SkyDrive works seamlessly with your Windows PC so you can access any file from anywhere. You can even stream videos. Windows transcodes your video automatically to fit your connection.
Windows 8 Consumer Preview: Every app connects to the cloud, no setup required

With SkyDrive for Windows, the cloud is another folder on your desktop. Any existing Windows app that can access the file system can now access SkyDrive. SkyDrive for Windows 8 also brings a seamless cloud experience to new Windows 8 apps. This opens up new possibilities, for example, using SkyDrive together with apps available now in the Windows Store like Mail, Docstoc and Skitch.

Please try these out today, share your feedback – and tell your friends. In the coming months, you’ll see SkyDrive continue to bring seamless personal cloud storage to Windows and Office that’s available anywhere.

SkyDrive APIs – Bring your data to any app, any platform, any device

Dare Obasanjo — Wed, 25 Apr 2012 18:15:03 GMT

On Monday, we released preview versions of SkyDrive for Windows and Mac, along with updates for iOS and Windows Phone. With SkyDrive on your desktop, you can now access files in the cloud right from any of your PC or Mac apps. And since we launched our API, we’ve been excited to see mobile, web, and Windows 8 developers add SkyDrive to their apps.

A key principle behind the approach we’ve taken with the SkyDrive developer platform is that while it should be seamlessly accessible from Windows devices and apps, it should also be ready to enable developers on any platform to build apps that make SkyDrive more useful. It’s your data. It should not be limited to apps for a single browser or brand of devices.

Given our recent announcements, we wanted to reiterate how developers can integrate SkyDrive into their apps and devices, showcase a few of our favorite integrations and let people know about a few developer events we are sponsoring in Amsterdam, NYC and Las Vegas.

Android apps

Developers of Android apps can use the Live SDK for Android to build mobile and tablet apps that provide access to a user’s documents and photos in SkyDrive. The SDK supports Android versions 2.2 (Froyo) to 4.0 (Ice Cream Sandwich). Browser for SkyDrive (below) is one of our most popular SkyDrive apps on Android. For more information see our getting started docs for Android development.

Desktop apps (Windows or Mac)

With SkyDrive for Windows and Mac, users can transparently cloud-enable their desktop apps without needing to customize the apps since the SkyDrive folder looks like a regular folder on the file system. This opens up literally millions of new possibilities for users.

In some cases, a desktop app may want to integrate directly with SkyDrive, without relying on the user having SkyDrive installed. For example, the SkyDrive gadget for Xobni brings powerful cloud-based sharing to Outlook, making it easy to share large files with email recipients without worrying about large file size limitations.

For more information see our getting started docs for desktop development.

iOS apps

In addition to the SkyDrive for iPhone and iPad, SkyDrive customers can also use any iPhone or iPad apps that use our SDK for iOS to integrate with SkyDrive. The SDK supports development using Xcode 4.1 on Mac OS X Snow Leopard and Xcode 4.2 on Mac OS X Lion.

A great example of an iOS app that integrates well with SkyDrive is DocScan. When there is no scanner available, DocScan lets you instantly scan multi-page documents with your iPhone, then annotate, and store them in the cloud for later use .

For more information see our getting started docs for iOS development

Mobile Devices

Not only are developers already delivering great SkyDrive apps that people can download to their Android and other phones – but some of the biggest Android OEMs like HTC have also already built SkyDrive right into their phones. HTC’s newest 4.0 devices such as the HTC One X come with SkyDrive, letting you seamlessly work with your SkyDrive photos and documents from their native Mail, Gallery, and Polaris Office experiences.

We have been excited by the enthusiasm for SkyDrive of people making other consumer devices like cameras. Samsung’s new line of WiFi enabled SMART cameras (Amazon) enables users to never lose their valuable memories by uploading pictures to SkyDrive directly from the camera.

Windows Phone apps

On Windows Phone, there have already been dozens of apps that have taken advantage of our SDK for Windows Phone. Apps such as HandyScan (shown below) augment SkyDrive’s seamless integration into the Office and Pictures hub on the phone by bringing personal cloud storage to the apps Windows Phone customers use every day.

For more information see our getting started docs for Windows Phone development

Showcasing your apps

As you can tell, we’re really proud of some of the apps that have integrated with SkyDrive and would like to share them with as many people as possible. That is why, with our release on Monday, we’ve also launched a new app showcase. Now millions of SkyDrive users can discover apps from third party developers that make it easier to share or work from anywhere. The showcase is available from within SkyDrive.com, so users can easily find apps while using the service.

Every month, we’ll add apps to our showcase based on usage and positive feedback from customers. Let us know about apps you like by telling us on Twitter.

Bringing SkyDrive to you and your app

To recap, developers can learn more about the SkyDrive API by visiting dev.live.com. You’ll find links to code samples on GitHub and overview docs, and you can also download our SDKs for Windows 8, WP7, iOS, and Android to simplify development on your favorite device platform. We also have REST APIs and a JavaScript API for web development.

To get the word out about how SkyDrive can help you and your apps, we’ll be attending and sponsoring a few developer events in the coming weeks:

4/25 – 4/27: TNW – Amsterdam
4/27 –4/29: Mobile Dev Camp – NYC
4/30 – 5/4: Future Insights Live – Las Vegas

Let us know if you’ll be there! We’d love to meet you. We’ll be available to help with questions you have on SkyDrive, and we’ll also have cool t-shirts to give away and some other special prizes for people integrating SkyDrive with their apps at these hackathons. Hope to see you there.

Dare Obasanjo
Lead Program Manager, Live Connect Platform

An even faster version of SkyDrive

Tony East — Sun, 01 Apr 2012 18:25:00 GMT

Update, April 24, 2012:

Please note: Even though it works great and shows off our developer APIs, SkyCMD was our April Fool’s joke for 2012. However, check out these real improvements to SkyDrive.

The past year has been an amazing time here on the SkyDrive team. We’re all very eager to ship the work we announced in our next release, but we can’t just sit back and relax. Like a shark, we have to keep moving forward. As we started to think about the next generation interface for SkyDrive, we needed something fresh. It’s too easy to get caught up in the visual distraction of a traditional GUI, especially when you really just want to see a directory listing of your files. As we pulled together the vision, our design principles included getting back to our monochromatic roots, presenting the user with fewer commands, all while providing the most powerful interface possible. So what is the next big thing?

Forget touch and even the mouse

The more we thought about it, the more we realized that the model we were looking for was right in front of us – or at least used to be. We harkened back to a time when computing was simpler. Sure, interface design has changed over the years, but do people really want to navigate through their files with the flick of a finger or view photos with a click of a mouse? Maybe. But we believe the first and best way for humans to interact with computers is through terse commands entered via the good old keyboard. That’s when it hit us: what the world needs is a SkyDrive Command Line Interface!

Introducing SkyCMD

Starting today, you can finally interact with SkyDrive the way you’ve always wanted to. You can use the classic DOS syntax to easily navigate your file hierarchy—familiar commands like “dir” and “cd.” Simple. Powerful.

SkyCMD: Command line access to your files on SkyDrive. Go to http://skycmd.com and check it out.

Once you connect SkyCMD to your SkyDrive account you can do many of the powerful things that only a CLI can offer. As for customization, try the “color” command to give your SkyCMD window a little flare.

Built from our SkyDrive APIs

One of our amazing developers, Luke, came up with the early rendition of SkyCMD and showed it around the SkyDrive hallways a couple months ago. We all loved it and knew that if it had a few more obscure commands and the right ASCII art we had a winner on our hands. The volume of internal feature requests for SkyCMD grew to the point that we’ve put the entire SkyDrive engineering organization to work building it. Our developer APIs, which Dare Obasanjo wrote about in his blog post back in December, are so powerful we just used those. We have even put the source code out as part of our sample code.

Of course in the near future we are going to ship what we recently announced and then some. But going forward the future of SkyDrive is SkyCMD!

Tony East
Lead Program Manager, SkyDrive.com

The war on graymail after 90 days: Over 100 million sweeps, cleanups and newsletters filtered

Dick Craddock — Tue, 21 Feb 2012 17:25:51 GMT

Hotmail introduced advanced features for fighting the war on graymail this past fall, and since then, customers have conquered graymail over 100 million times using features like Sweep and Schedule Cleanup. In this post, I’ll talk about how Hotmail customers are taking control of their email with Sweep, Schedule Cleanup, and Hotmail’s newsletter filter, and we’ll show you how these tools can help you conquer graymail in your own inbox in just 60 seconds.

The best tools for fighting graymail

Graymail—messages like newsletters, daily deals, and notifications—is filling up inboxes all over the world. Newsletters alone typically make up more than 50% of a person’s email. Managing all that graymail takes time and can be a hassle. Hotmail continues to add innovative features to let you take control of graymail and take back your inbox.

Hotmail’s newsletter category automatically identifies most newsletters and lets you see them all in one place with a single click. One-click unsubscribe lets you get rid of unwanted newsletters instantly.

Schedule Cleanup is a powerful new feature that lets you automatically manage bulk mail. With Schedule Cleanup, you can:

Keep only the latest message from a given sender (by far the most popular choice when using Schedule Cleanup).
Delete messages as they get old (3 days, 10 days, 30 days, or 60 days).
Move messages to a folder as they get old.

Schedule Cleanup not only takes care of the mail you’ve already received, but keeps working for you as you receive new mail. It’s one of the most efficient ways to keep your inbox tidy.

Sweep lets you move or delete unwanted graymail quickly and easily, and can even automatically set up rules for managing new mail as it arrives.

Categories let you organize your mail the way you want. Hotmail automatically categorizes things like newsletters, social updates, photos, Office docs and shipping updates. Now, you can create your own categories and have each one show up as a QuickView.

And of course, these features work well together. Categories can be used together with Schedule Cleanup, making those tools even more powerful. For instance, you can use Schedule Cleanup to delete all newsletters as they get old, just by using Schedule Cleanup on the newsletter category.

100 million actions and counting

It’s been just two months since we finished the deployment of our most recent major release, and we’ve already seen millions of people use these tools to quickly take control of their own inbox. Let’s take a look at some of the numbers.

Since November, 2011, customers have performed over 100 million actions to conquer graymail: Sweeping, categorizing, and using Schedule Cleanup.

You’re using Sweep to get unwanted email out of your inbox: 90% of Sweep actions are “Delete all from this sender.”
You’re letting Sweep set up rules automatically: When you use Sweep to move mail from a given sender into a folder, you let Sweep automatically set up a rule 60% of the time. That means Sweep keeps working for you as you get new email, even when you are away from your inbox.
You’re using Schedule Cleanup to keep only the most recent newsletter or deal: 65% of Schedule Cleanup actions are “Only keep the latest message from this sender.”

And what’s more, we’re seeing an increasing use of these powerful tools. Each month, more people use Sweep and Schedule Cleanup to get rid of their graymail. In fact, we’ve seen a double-digit increase in the use of these features month-over-month since our October release.

Take back your inbox in 60 seconds

The best news is that these tools are quick and easy to use. In this video, we’ll show you how you can take back your own inbox in just 60 seconds.

More and more people are using Hotmail’s innovative tools to fight their own war on graymail, and we hope you’ll give these tools a try yourself. We’d love to hear about your own experience using Sweep, Schedule Cleanup, categories, and the rest.

As always, thanks for using Hotmail.

Dick Craddock

Group Program Manager, Hotmail

SkyDrive and Windows 8

Omar Shahine — Mon, 20 Feb 2012 17:02:00 GMT

Mike Torres and I just shared a post and video on the Building Windows 8 blog that details a key step we are taking with Windows 8 towards our vision of personal cloud storage. The post describes how we plan to scale our services to billions of people, and some of the coming improvements, including a new Metro style app for Windows 8, SkyDrive integration in Windows Explorer, and the ability to fetch any file remotely from SkyDrive.com.

We encourage you to read the full post and share comments on Building Windows 8.

- Omar

We aren’t surprised that Hotmail’s spam protection is the best in the business

Dick Craddock — Mon, 13 Feb 2012 17:30:42 GMT

Hotmail has come a long way in spam protection and is now among the best in the industry in keeping spam out of your inbox. Our own internal metrics, customer feedback, and even a recent third-party report confirms that no mail service offers better protection than Hotmail. You can read all about it in the Gadgetwise column in the New York Times.

Our years of improvements in Hotmail’s SmartScreen technology have led to record low rates of spam in the inbox (SITI), and our customers can tell the difference. We’ve driven SITI down below 3% for a typical Hotmail inbox, and, more importantly, we’ve kept the number there.

Beyond the metrics

Our metrics tell us that we’re doing a good job, and we’re pleased with the progress. But let’s look beyond metrics for a moment. Keeping your inbox clean is about three things, and Hotmail does a great job on all three:

Driving true SITI down as low as possible
We’ve recently lowered true SITI an additional 25% since our last update. We’re getting great results, and we just keep improving.
Reducing clutter and graymail
We automatically identify newsletters and give our customers powerful tools for getting through their Inbox faster, including one-click filters to see only the mail you want.
Reduce obvious spam in the Junk folder
Sure, it’s great to keep spam out of the inbox, but you still need to visit your Junk folder every now and then to make sure you haven’t missed something important. Hotmail not only keeps more spam out of your inbox, it keeps obvious spam out of your Junk folder to make this job easier. In fact, our recent efforts have reduced the size of our customers’ Junk folders by more than 50% - that’s about a half a billion fewer pure spam messages per day.

Our customers can tell the difference

Metrics are great, but what we really care about is hearing from our customers about their own experiences with Hotmail. We have several ways to get customer feedback:

Customer support: Complaints related to spam, including phishing, junk and malware, have dropped by over 40% over the past year.

Direct customer feedback: Hotmail includes a feedback link, which we call “voice of the customer” or VOTC. Our voice of the customer data gives us incredibly valuable feedback and verbatim comments from you on what’s going well and what isn’t. We take this feedback seriously: members of the development team read this feedback every day and spend time categorizing it, finding patterns and trends, and using it to make product improvments. The total number of complaints related to spam has shrunk by over 50% over the past two years. This would be a great result by itself, but it’s even more remarkable when you consider that our overall feedback volume has been steadily increasing.

We’ve seen really spectacular progress in certain areas around spam management. For example, complaints about managing safe and blocked sender lists has dropped to near zero. Questions like “why did my mail end up where it did?” have similarly dropped to near zero. Complaints around “repeat spam” have been cut in half – from 35% down to 17% of complaint volume.

While we’re happy with the results, we know that there are still areas to improve. For example, we still see feedback on phishing attacks.

In-product telemetry: We know that customers who use Hotmail regularly (for example, as their primary email) see lower than average SITI due to our investments in personalization of our spam filtering. Put simply: the more you use Hotmail, the better the experience gets.

An independent study confirms it: no one beats Hotmail

As much as we invest in our own telemetry and instrumentation to understand the spam problem, sometimes it’s nice to get an outside perspective. Cascade Insights gave us just that recently with a comprehensive study of the major email services to see how each performed in the face of incoming spam. We were excited to see an analyst go deep on SPAM and compare the different webmail providers, so we’ve paid Cascade for rights to access and distribute their private report and methodology.

The short story? No one did better than Hotmail. In fact, Hotmail and Gmail were dead even when dealing with spam, and both did much better than other email providers.

The methodology defined by Cascade Insights was straightforward and consistent across email providers. It’s important to note that this was just one study which used a particular methodology, and that your own results may vary. But we’re confident that if you use Hotmail for your primary email, you’ll get the best spam protection in the industry – no one does it better.

Give us a try

If you’re already using Hotmail, we want to hear from you. You can use the Feedback link in Hotmail to let us know about your own spam experience.

If you haven’t tried us out in a while, take a look. If you have a Hotmail account that you haven’t been using, you may see some accumulation of mail you don’t want. Some of it might be old spam, and some might be graymail. (That’s legitimate email that you just don’t want, like newsletters or daily deals you’re no longer interested in. We’ll have more on that subject soon.) We recommend using Sweep to clean up your Inbox, then using Hotmail as your primary email for a while to get the benefit of our improvements, especially what we’ve done with personalization. Once you start using your account again, you should see very little spam on an ongoing basis.

We’re working hard to keep spam out of your inbox, and we hope you like the results. As always, thanks for using Hotmail.

Dick Craddock
Group Program Manager, Hotmail

Solving the attachment problem with SkyDrive

Anand Babu — Fri, 10 Feb 2012 16:57:26 GMT

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 have with traditional email attachments and how the cloud can solve them. We’ve also included a few tips for how SkyDrive can help at work – where we’re often inundated with attachments. (SkyDrive may be particularly helpful if your workplace hasn’t made the switch yet from outdated to modern tools.)

We hope you find these tips helpful – and look out for more updates soon.

- Anand Babu, Group Product Marketer, SkyDrive

The attachment problem

Every day, the average office worker receives over 170 email messages a day, and sends over 35. With that kind of volume, it’s understandable that over half of the average work day consists of dealing with email. That’s over 1000 hours a year. It’s worth taking a look at where people can save some time on the process.

Dealing with email attachments is a big contributor to the amount of time spent on email. In Hotmail alone, there are over 1 billion email messages sent with file attachments per week. While attachments can be useful, in many situations, they aren’t the right tool for the job.

To see how much time an attachment can waste during its life, click here to see our infographic.

Here are some examples of when attachments are frequently a waste of time:

1. Working together on a document

If you use email to work with others on a doc, everyone has their own edited version saved locally on a computer that they then have to send as an email attachment to the group. With so many doc versions being sent back and forth, docs can get lost and a lot of extra work is created. If people edit simultaneously, someone will have to go through multiple versions and try to merge edits into one doc. It’s colossally inefficient and potentially migraine inducing.

2. Sharing and publishing files

If you need to share files with a large audience, using email often means sending files over and over again—either because you need to update the files after you send them, or because the people you sent the files to lost your attachment in the chaos of their inbox.

3. Sending large files

Most of us have had the problem where we tried to send files that got bounced back because their file size was too big, or because your recipient’s inbox couldn’t handle a massive file you just sent. Even if you zip or break apart your attachments, that takes a lot of extra time-wasting steps to send those files.

4. Making notes and files available anywhere, anytime, across devices

Accessing your important files anywhere should not require you to send an email to yourself. Even though we all do it, that method is pretty primitive. You usually end up having to search for the email buried somewhere in your inbox or sending it again later.

The attachment solution

Today’s cloud services offer a great alternative to attachments that solve many of these problems. Instead of emailing docs back and forth for group editing, SkyDrive lets you edit the doc in one place using Office Web Apps or Office on your PC and Mac—saving all your versions in one place. Sharing files, large or small, is also easier on SkyDrive because you can send out a link to the doc to avoid attachment size limits. Also, you can use the link to edit the doc even after you send it to others.

Yet despite the efficiency of the cloud, the vast majority of people still cling to email attachments. What’s holding people back? While some services solve the attachment problem better than others the real enemy is inertia. We spend so much of our time in email that attachments seem like the most convenient option.

There are two key things we are doing to address this inertia:

1. Connecting SkyDrive to webmail

Our primary approach has been to bring SkyDrive into the natural place where people send files, which as we’ve mentioned is email. Hotmail allows you to easily send documents and photos via SkyDrive. The integration of Office Web Apps means you won’t lose your formatting when you send your files as online documents. And you can even configure Hotmail to always send files using SkyDrive by default.

Of course, for people using services like Gmail, you can access your email right from Hotmail as well as import your contacts. This way, you can send those links to SkyDrive files using the Hotmail features, while still keeping your Gmail identity.

Already, files uploaded to SkyDrive represent over 15% of the total number of email attachments sent via Hotmail every month. This share is growing rapidly – with monthly uploads to SkyDrive up over 90% in the last year alone.

2. Making it easy for other apps and services to work with SkyDrive

We know that people share files using many different devices, apps and email clients. That’s a key reason why we’ve focused on making it easy for developers to add SkyDrive to their experiences.

An example is Xobni who recently released a SkyDrive Gadget. If you use Xobni for Outlook, it’s easy to email a link to a file on SkyDrive without leaving Outlook. Use the gadget to find the SkyDrive file that you want to share. With a single click, you can copy the link to your clipboard or compose a new message including the link.

Tips for avoiding attachment problems

To help overcome inertia, we have launched a new site www.attachmentssuck.com to help you teach your friends how to make the switch from attachments to SkyDrive. Encourage your friends and co-workers to start saving themselves (and you) hours of time.

In addition, here are a few power tips that are particularly relevant if you share presentations frequently. (You can get other tips for avoiding attachments, here.)

Tip 1: Upload and organize presentations on SkyDrive

Upload your presentations (or any other file) to SkyDrive. You may also want to use folders or subfolders to keep all of your presentations related to a particular topic or customer in one place. That way, it’s easy for you to reference and easy for recipients to find content—with a single a link to your folder.

Upload your presentation to SkyDrive

Organize your presentations by subject

Choose to share an entire folder, or just one file

Tip 2: Share frequently used presentations right from Outlook

If you install the SkyDrive Gadget for Xobni, you can send a link to SkyDrive files right from Outlook. Just click the SkyDrive gadget tab in the Xobni app, find the file you want to share, and click “Email a Link” to pop up an email window with the link.

Unlike other cloud services, SkyDrive integrates with Office Web Apps so your recipients don’t need to have the same version of Office that you do (or any Office software) to be able to view what you send them. Also, thanks to our recent sharing improvements, you can easily share files in any of your SkyDrive folders without having to copy or move them to a special folder.

Note: The Xobni gadget gives your recipients access to view files only. If you want to let them edit your doc or add files to a folder, visit SkyDrive.com to get a link to view and edit.

Tip 3: Send once, update often

If you’ll need to make edits to the presentation later, open it from SkyDrive in PowerPoint 2010 and pin the presentation to your Windows 7 taskbar for easy access. Then you can easily update it on your PC and anyone with your link will automatically have access to the updated version.

Tip 4: Share your presentation like an expert

If you’re giving your presentation remotely or on a screen, you can include a unique bit.ly link on the last slide that directs viewers to your presentation on your SkyDrive. Just go to bit.ly, enter the SkyDrive address of your presentation, hit “customize” and enter a unique and descriptive title after the forward slash. Like: bit.ly/skydriveecards.

If you’re giving handouts of your presentation, you can create a QR code to include on the printed version, linking to your presentation on SkyDrive, so meeting attendees can scan the tag/code and access the presentation. To add a QR code to your bit.ly link, just append .qr to the end of the URL like so: bit.ly/skydriveecards.qr. Click the link, and you’ve got your QR code.

Tip 5: Present from anywhere

When you’re on the road, you can view and edit the presentation from anywhere—even if you’re on a device without Office, using the Office Web Apps on SkyDrive.

Where do we go from here?

SkyDrive will continue to fight the good fight against the attachment problem. We will do this by making SkyDrive an even better alternative to attachments and by working with partners to bring SkyDrive to the places that people share today. If you’re a developer inspired by our mission to solve the attachment problem, our APIs are available here.

Lia Yu, Sr. Product Marketer, SkyDrive