When Windows Live Calendar came out of beta in January, we introduced a birthday calendar to automatically keep track of your contacts’ birthdays. We’ve just improved the birthday calendar to make it even more flexible.

Whenever you add birthday information in your contact list, it appears in your calendar. But now you can also add birthdays right from inside the birthday calendar (and they’ll automatically sync with your contact list).

When you add a new birthday, you can call attention to it with a special charm and you can set a second reminder (so you really don’t forget to buy that gift).

If you don’t like the birthday calendar, you can turn it off or delete the whole thing. Deleting the birthday calendar doesn’t change what’s in your contact list, so you can always add the birthday calendar back later.

There are a few other additions to the settings page: you can also change the default charm that goes with birthdays. And you can refresh the calendar to make sure it has all the latest birthdays that are in your contact list.

We hope these improvements help you keep track of birthdays.

Happy scheduling,

The Windows Live Calendar Team

Sometimes we’re not connected to the internet or unexpectedly the service we’re trying to connect to isn’t available – we find ourselves in need of accessing e-mail offline. Windows Live provides you options when things fall down because we understand that people depend on their e-mail for information. With Windows Live Mail or Outlook Connector for Outlook, you can access your Hotmail and other e-mail accounts offline and have a richer experience than possible on the web. So when the unexpected happens, you’ll still have access to your e-mail though the comfort of the mail programs on your PC.

Best,
The Windows Live Team

Today, we are changing the way Windows Live Hotmail messages come into Microsoft Office Outlook, Outlook Express, and Entourage. While you may have to tweak some settings, you will notice additional speed and efficiency. Please check out our previous post to learn what you need to do in order to keep receiving Hotmail in Outlook, Outlook Express, or Entourage.

Keep in mind, this does not affect access through the web and customers can continue to view Hotmail messages on the web at http://mail.live.com or http://www.hotmail.com.

Questions or trouble updating your mail program? View the FAQ page or visit the help community.

Technical details for those who are curious. Microsoft Office Outlook, Outlook Express, and Entourage use the legacy DAV protocol to access Hotmail messages. Today, we are retiring the DAV protocol. As Hotmail storage has evolved, DAV has become an inefficient solution for syncing e-mail (it downloads the whole mailbox instead of just changes). We have two alternatives now: DeltaSync and POP3. DeltaSync synchronizes your e-mail, just like DAV, but is much faster since it only downloads the latest changes to your mailbox. Both the Windows Live Mail and Outlook Connector e-mail programs use this efficient protocol. POP3 is a tried-and-true protocol and works with nearly all e-mail programs. If choosing to use POP3, there are a couple of things you need to keep in mind about the protocol. Click here to find out more.

Thank you for using Windows Live Hotmail.

Sincerely,
Your Windows Live Hotmail Team

Want to find just the right event in your area this weekend? Worried about finding something fun to do with the kids when you’re on vacation in a new town? Try the enhanced MSN City Guides, Bing event search or any of the Zvents co-branded services around the Web to find cool happenings and immediately add them to personal or shared calendars in Windows Live.

Give it a try!

1. Visit MSN City Guides at http://thingstodo.msn.com
2. Enter something like “concerts” and the name of your local town or city. In the example below, we’re searching for concerts in Mountain View, CA

3. Click on one of the events in the result list to review details. In the example below, we’ve clicked on “Alumni Concert.” You can now review the details of the event.

4. Now, to make sure that you don’t forget about the event, you can add it to your personal or shared calendars in Windows Live. Just click anywhere you see the calendar icon with Save,.

5. After you click the icon with Save,, you’ll see a number of options for calendars that you can save to, like Microsoft Office Outlook and Windows Live Calendar. For our example, we’ll click Windows Live Calendar. If you’re already logged in to Windows Live, you’ll see the event details right away. If you’re not logged in, you’ll be prompted to do that first.  

6. Here are the event details pre-populated with the event content from the MSN City Guides page. Notice that I chose to add a “music” charm and also invited a person to the event by sending a Windows Live Calendar event invitation. I could also choose to save this event onto a shared calendar with a spouse, significant other or friend. I can also set a reminder for the event. And, reminders can arrive through the Windows Live Alerts service via Windows Live Messenger, SMS on my mobile phone, or via e-mail. 

Here’s some more cool stuff. Notice that if you do a Bing search for say, “Events near Santa Cruz, CA,” you will now see a list of upcoming events near that location. Click an event and you will see the event details in MSN City Guides. And, if you choose to add the event to your calendar, you’ll be able to select Windows Live Calendar from the top of the list.

Finally, a great thing about our partnership with Zvents is that they power event search and listings at hundreds of sites around the Web. So, in addition to searching for events through MSN City Guides, you can also visit many other sites with event listings. Clicking events in those sites will bring up the familiar Save icon, too. Use it to add your events to Windows Live Calendar. And, when you’re ready to travel around the world, you can use Zvents to find events in hundreds of national and international cities.  

We hope to see you at concerts, plays, and festivals around the world!

Thanks for using our service,

The Windows Live Calendar team

Some of you may have noticed that lately, you can no longer add photos directly into the body of a Windows Live Hotmail message the way you used to do. The Windows Live team is constantly reviewing Hotmail to ensure quality service to our customers. During a recent review, we identified an incompatibility with Internet Explorer that caused a security flaw with photo uploads, and we made the decision to temporarily remove the feature. The Hotmail team takes security very seriously and we expect to bring back the photo upload feature by the end of September. In the meantime, you can still add pictures as attachments to your Hotmail messages, by clicking Attach, and then File, and then selecting the picture you want to include.

We apologize for any inconvenience that this may cause you until this fix is complete.

The Windows Live team

A recent Live Wire blog post talked about how to add a baseball schedule to your Windows Live Calendar. It included a step requiring you to copy and paste a link into your calendar.  If you’re a Firefox 3.x user, there’s a shortcut you can use to make this step easier.

1) Visit calendar.live.com in Firefox 3.x and sign in.

2) Copy the following link into the your address bar and press Enter:

javascript:window.navigator.registerProtocolHandler('webcal', 'http://calendar.live.com/calendar.aspx?rru=addsubscription&src=ff&url=%s','Subscribe in Windows Live Calendar');

3) Click Add Application

4) Now when you click on a webcal:// link (links to Calendar files), you’ll have the option to open the link in Windows Live Calendar:

5) Check the box “Remember my choice for webcal links”—that way, every time you click on a webcal link, it’ll automatically open in Windows Live Calendar. After you click OK, you’ll go directly to the calendar subscription page.

6) Now just name the calendar, choose a color, and click “Subscribe to calendar”. That’s all there is to it.

To change your webcal settings, go to Tools, select Options, and then Applications.

We are happy to announce that Hotmail customers in the US, Canada, and Brazil can now add other e-mail accounts to Hotmail!* No need to sign into multiple services to check all your messages on the web. Instead, you can see any POP-enabled e-mail account (including Yahoo! Mail (Plus), AOL Mail, and Gmail) right from your Hotmail account. You can put all of your messages together in your inbox or each e-mail account in its own folder, your choice.

You can set this up in Hotmail in three simple steps:

(1) Click Add an e-mail account on the left-hand side of the Hotmail inbox.

(2) Type the e-mail address and password for your other account, and click Next.

(3) Choose where you want the messages to go, and click Save.

Note: In order for this to work, make sure POP has been turned on in the POP-enabled e-mail service you want to add (this could involve signing in to the service and changing your settings there).

We hope this feature will help you simplify your digital life!

Windows Live Hotmail Team

* This feature was launched earlier this year in the UK, France, Netherlands, Italy, Spain, Japan, and Germany, and was greeted with some very positive feedback. Today, customers in the US, Canada, and Brazil will see the feature for the first time. More countries will come later this year.

With new web-based instant messaging (IM) now available from Windows Live Hotmail worldwide, we are preparing to retire MSN Web Messenger. The old MSN Web Messenger experience will end on June 30, 2009.

With Hotmail’s new web-based IM, you can chat from your Hotmail inbox or contact list, instead of going to MSN Web Messenger (http://webmessenger.msn.com/). Go directly to the Windows Live People page (also known as “your contact list”) at http://people.live.com and sign into Messenger (orange arrow in the picture below) to continue instant messaging on the web with your Messenger friends.

Instant messaging from Hotmail makes it easier to communicate and share in new ways in comparison to MSN Web Messenger. For example, our integration with the suite of other Windows Live services allows you to see when your Messenger friends are online while reading an e-mail and immediately start a chat to clarify something in your friend’s e-mail message.

Give it a try! We hope that you’ll enjoy Hotmail’s web-based IM, the new version of Messenger on the web.

Your Windows Live Hotmail Team

Do you ever find yourself scrambling to get the address for your child’s sporting event? Or needing to find a friend’s number so you can check when you’re meeting for lunch? You can now use text messaging on your mobile phone to see your upcoming events on Windows Live Calendar. You can also search your Windows Live contact list or add new contacts—all from your mobile phone. No mobile browser or data plan needed—if you can send and receive text messages on your mobile phone then you should check out SMS for Windows Live.

To get started, just register your mobile number with Windows Live. (Don’t worry; this part is easy—there are detailed instructions at this end of this blog post). You’ll then send a text message (SMS) with a “command” to a shortcode:

• If you’re in the US and your mobile operator is AT&T, Verizon, T-Mobile, Sprint, or Nextel, your shortcode is MyLive or 695483.
• If you’re in the UK and your mobile operator is Vodafone, Orange, T-Mobile, O2, or Virgin, your shortcode is 88804.

Standard SMS messaging costs apply in both the US and UK. So your mobile operator will charge your normal rate for each text message you send and receive. There’s no additional charge from Microsoft.

How to use the new SMS services

After you’ve registered your phone number, and started the service, you’re ready to start sending commands. Below are all of the things you can do with SMS for Windows Live, along with the commands you’ll need to know.

Check your calendar
To see your Windows Live Calendar events for today or tomorrow: Send a text message with the command today or tomorrow. Windows Live sends you a text message that lists the date, time, and subject of each event. To get more details about an event, reply with the event number.

Search your contacts
If you aren’t syncing your Windows Live contacts (or if you don’t have a Windows Mobile phone and can’t sync), you can use SMS commands to search your contacts and see contact details. To search your Windows Live contacts: Send a text message with the command srch followed by the name of the person you’re looking for.

Check out all the cool stuff you can do with text messaging for Windows Live.


To register your mobile phone and start using SMS for Windows Live

To use SMS for Windows Live, you need to register your phone and start the service. Don’t worry, it’s simple. Here’s how you do it:

1. On a computer go to the Window Live Mobile website and sign in with your Windows Live ID.
2. In the text box under Set up SMS, enter your mobile phone number and click Next.
3. Check your phone info, if everything looks good, click Next. If any of the info isn’t correct, click change it and make your corrections.
4. We’ll send a text message with a four-digit PIN code to your mobile phone. Enter the PIN code and click Next.
5. Your mobile phone number is registered with your Windows Live account. Now you need to start the service. To start using the new SMS for Windows Live services, under Personal Message, Calendar and Contacts, click Start. You’re all set to go!
   If you haven’t tried the other Windows Live SMS services (they’re not new, but maybe they’re new to you) now is a great time to do so. Under Hotmail, Messenger and other alerts, click Start and check out how you can use text messaging with Hotmail, Messenger and alerts.
6. After you start the service you’ll get another text message with some additional info that our lawyers want us to tell you about.

Tip: Save the text message sender as a contact in your mobile phone, so you’ll have it handy when you need it.

Enjoy the new SMS for Windows Live services!

It’s almost moving time! We’ve been busy getting Windows Live Calendar ready so that we can move all MSN Calendar customers over to the new and improved service on Windows Live.

Over the coming months, we’ll be moving all data from existing MSN Calendar customers over to Windows Live Calendar. The move will be gradual, that is, not everyone will see their calendars change on the same day.

If you’re just trying Windows Live Calendar for the first time, you may notice that while MSN Calendar already gave you easy scheduling of appointments, reminders, and calendar sharing, Windows Live Calendar gives you even more:

• Multiple calendars that can be individually colored and shared
• An easy way to subscribe to public (iCal) online calendars
• Drag-and-drop rescheduling of events
• Holiday calendars based on your location
• A birthday calendar that pulls dates from your Windows Live contact list
• A to-do list to help keep you organized (we’ll move all of your MSN Calendar’s tasks and notes into your new Windows Live to-do list)

Here’s what you need to know for the move:

• If you only access your MSN Calendar through the web, we’ll move all your stuff for you. You won’t have to do anything.
• If you use Microsoft Office Outlook to view your calendar, make sure you’re using the newest version of Outlook Connector. This will allow Outlook to connect directly to your Windows Live Calendar. To find out which version of Outlook Connector you’re using, open Outlook, click Outlook Connector and then select About Outlook Connector. If the version number is 12.0.6414.1000 or greater, you’re good to go. If not, you’ll need to download and install the latest version.
• If you’ve published publically or shared any of your MSN Calendars, you’ll need to publish or share them again in Windows Live Calendar.

That’s it—we’ll do the rest.

Note: Windows Live Calendar doesn’t currently support displaying attachments or sending reminders to a secondary e-mail address.

See you on Windows Live Calendar!

My last post talked about how to create a calendar badge. Assuming you’ve now created a cool new badge, you probably want to customize it so that it matches your website.

You need to know a little basic HTML. Follow these steps to give your badge a new look:

1. First you need to decide what to show in your badge. The badge displays both the calendar grid and the event list by default.  To show just the grid, add the query parameter “l=m” to the iframe tag.  To show just the event list, add “l=a” instead.

2. Next you can choose the width of your badge. There are two choices:  141 pixels or 194 pixels. To make it 141 pixels, add the query parameter “w=n”; to go wider at 194 pixels, change it to “w=w”.

3. You can also choose the height of the event list. There are four different heights to choose from:

a. For a short event list (shows one event): Add “h=s”

b. For medium (3 events): Add “h=m”

c. For medium-tall (5 events): Add “h=mt”

d. For tall (7 events): Add “h=t”

The number of events shown is approximate.  The size of the badge’s calendar grid is not affected by the height of the event list.

4. Now it’s time to give your badge some color. There are six colors in the badge that you can change:

Generate the HTML color IDs for your six colors and then pass them in a query parameter, making sure to leave out the “#” that is normally part of the color code. It should look like this:

c=<backgroundColorId>|<borderColorId>|<textColorId>|<alternateTextColorId>|<linkColorId>|<selectionColorId>

Note: We only accept the three or six-digit numeric color codes, not the color names.

Finally, the iframe itself has dimensions and borders that can only be controlled by your page’s code.  You’ll need to set the iframe’s size so that your badge will fit. Also, give it a frame border of 0 and set scrolling to “no”. You can do this with straight HTML or a combination of HTML and CSS.

Let’s put this all together in an example. We’ll create a tall, wide badge with both the calendar grid and event list. We’ll make the background white and the borders and main text black. We’ll give it gray alternate text, lavender links, and a bluish day selection highlight. Substitute in your own user code and calendar name (see this post for how to get those), and your badge’s iframe tag will look like this:

<iframe frameborder="0" scrolling="no" width="194" height="692" src="http://calendar.live.com/calendar/badgeif.aspx?pid=p&user=<userCode>&cal=<calendarName>&h=t&w=w&l=ma&c=ffffff|000000|000000|cccccc|9999ff|ddeeff" />

That’s all there is to it. Happy customizing!

-Evan

We’re happy to announce that Windows Live Hotmail is integrating instant messaging capabilities within its web interface. With this functionality, you can get your email and IM all in one place!  This feature lets you IM your Windows Live Messenger contacts from within your Hotmail inbox or People page without having to switch over to the Messenger client.

The feature arrives today in Brazil, Canada, China, Germany, the Netherlands, Norway, and the US, and joins countries that rolled out web messenger last month (France, Italy, Japan, Mexico, Spain, and the UK). Not in your geography yet? We will be rolling web-based messenger to more locations in the coming months.

Send an instant message from anywhere – With this new feature, you’ll now have instant messaging capabilities when you use a public or otherwise shared computer, without having to download a client program.  Already logged in to Messenger elsewhere?  Not a problem  -- you have the option to sign-in (or sign-out) from Hotmail through the “Messenger” drop down menu even if you are signed into the client elsewhere.

Start a chat easily and immediately – See something interesting in an email?  Or confused about a friend’s response?  Start a chat instantly with your friend.  Inside an email, simply click on the presence indicator next to the sender’s name to start a chat.  A window will pop up displaying your chat conversation and allowing you to instant message while viewing your email.

All your contacts in one place – You can chat with any of the Windows Live Messenger contacts in your People page (click “People” in the Windows Live header). Or, from the “Messenger” drop down in the top right corner, you can click “view Messenger contacts”. Once you’re on your contact list, click on a person’s picture and select “Send an Instant Message”.

We hope you’re as excited as we are about the new integrated instant messaging feature within Hotmail. Try it out soon and let us know your thoughts!

Your Windows Live Hotmail Team

Do you have a calendar you’d like to share with the world?  With Windows Live Calendar, you can create a calendar badge to post on your blog or website. That way, anyone can see your calendar from any browser.

Here’s what a calendar badge looks like:

You can move forward and backward in time by clicking either a date or the month arrows.  The event list shows events starting from the highlighted day. It will show as many as will fit within the badge’s height. (My next blog post will show you how to adjust the size of your badge.)

Here’s how you create a badge:

1. Click on the calendar that you’d like to share — you can find your list of calendars on the left side of the page.

2. This brings up the calendar settings page. Click Edit sharing, and then Share this calendar.

3. Check the box for Make your Calendar public, and then click Get your calendar links.

4. Click Preview in a web browser—the pop up shows a URL like this:

http://cid-235e8e235b98a7295.calendar.live.com/calendar/My+calendar/index.html.  This can be a little tricky, but I’ve tried to make it simple for you. For the calendar badge URL, the two important parts are your user code (cid-235e8e235b98a7295) and your calendar’s published name (My+calendar).  You will use these values in the final step.

5. Some calendar publishing URLs may not be in the format shown in step 4. If the URL doesn’t start with “http://cid-”, click the Profile link at the top of the page. When the profile page has loaded, the URL will look something like this: “http:// cid-235e8e235b98a7295.profile.live.com/?...” Your user code is there in the URL.

6. Build the HTML snippet for the badge using the user code and calendar published name. Take the following HTML code and replace [user-code] with your user code and [calendar-name] with your calendar’s published name. You can then re-use this HTML snippet anywhere you want to show a badge for that calendar.

<iframe src=http://calendar.live.com/calendar/badgeif.aspx?user=[user-code]&cal=[calendar-name]></iframe>

One wrinkle for you savvy bloggers and web designers is that the badge won’t obey your page’s CSS. But fear not, the badge can still be customized so that it works well in any web page. I’ll leave the details of how to customize your badge for the next post.

Happy sharing!

-Evan

We are aware that some of you may be experiencing difficulty accessing your Windows Live Hotmail accounts. We’re actively investigating the cause and are working to fix this as quickly as possible. We sincerely apologize for any inconvenience and disruption this may be causing you.

The Windows Live Hotmail Team

Update:  Service has been restored for all users, and we’re taking steps to make sure this doesn’t happen again.  Thanks again for your patience, and we’ll make sure to keep you updated. 

In my last post, I talked about how to avoid e-mail overload by using to-do lists to save my messages from an inbox black hole.  But even with those ideas, I still found it difficult to sift through all the e-mail I received on a daily basis.  I knew there had to be a better way to manage my inbox and I thought that some of you may have struggled with this also. Here are some of the tips and tricks that have helped me cut my inbox clutter.

Set up automatic filters

It’s best to use filters sparingly.  When I first experimented with rules and filters, I got very excited and set up them up for just about everything.  I had folders for everyone and filtered the messages by sender.  I quickly found that checking too many folders is a nightmare.  My inbox became useless because it only had the e-mail messages that I didn’t really care about.  So, I refocused my filter efforts.

I removed all the filters for individuals and instead, filtered mailing list and auto-generated e-mail into their own folders.  This greatly reduced my inbox clutter and gave me the control I needed to read those bulk mails when I had time.

Set up reminders

Once I had a good set of folders and filters set up, my inbox was usable again.  But then I ran into a new problem—I didn’t check the new folders regularly, and I couldn’t seem to get into the habit of checking them.  The new folders were turning into smaller versions of my cluttered inbox. Another black hole.

I decided to set up a daily reminder for myself to check those folders.  I created a daily recurring event in Windows Live Calendar for each folder I needed to check, blocked out as much time as I’d need for that folder, and set a reminder for the event.  This turned out to be a great solution because in addition to receiving reminders to check my folders, the event allowed me to block out the time I needed to check them. Problem solved!

Here’s how to create a filter in Hotmail:

1. Go to Options and select More options.

2. Select Automatically sort e-mail into folders.

3. Click New Filter and then choose which message types you want to filter and where you want those messages to go. That’s all there is to it!

Here’s how to create an event in Windows Live Calendar:

1. Go to http://calendar.live.com/, or from Hotmail, click Calendar under Related places in the bottom left side of the screen.

Windows Live Calendar will ask you to select your time zone if this is your first time visiting the site.

2. Click New, and enter your event’s details in the pop-up.  To make it a recurring event or to customize the reminder, click Add more details.

3. Save it and you’re done!

More productivity posts are coming soon.

Enjoy,

Evan