In the past few years, we’ve been investing heavily in building the best web e-mail offering. But part of the team has also been intently focused on delivering the next-generation web calendar: Windows Live Calendar.  It’s been a long time coming and we’ve been pretty hush-hush about it. Today, we’re finally ready to invite the world to try the new Windows Live Calendar beta!

From the get-go, we know that we want to build a calendaring tool that is slick, fast and effortless to use. Keeping track of schedules is no easy task. We all prefer to spend more time living life (or coding if you’re like most of our developers) than organizing life with an overly complicated tool.  So let me give you a quick tour of what I love most about Windows Live Calendar.

Effortlessly make your plans

Using AJAX technology, we’ve made it easy for you to get in and out of your calendar quickly.

·         In a rush? Simply click a time anywhere in the week and add an event.

·         Forgot where your next class is? Mouse over an event to get more details.

·         A doctor’s appointment got moved? Drag and drop it to the right day.

There are also some nifty features to help you scan through your schedule easily. My personal favorite is that navigating from month to month has never been easier -- you can use your mouse wheel to scroll through until you find the right week.

Stay coordinated with friends and family

If you have a family, you know how difficult it is to coordinate schedules between spouses and kids’ activities. If you’re a student, you know how consuming it is to find time to meet for school projects with your classmates. By sharing schedules on Windows Live Calendar, we take the chore out of coordination.

·         Share as much or as little of your calendar with free/busy, read-only, or read/write permissions.

·         Send friends a view-only secret link to your calendar so they don’t need to sign in with a Windows Live ID.

You can also make your calendar public, so if you’re running a business or an organization that is keen on promoting events, you can make it easy for people to find out what’s going on.

Get reminded

Sometimes we forget our commitments so Windows Live Calendar delivers you reminders through e-mail, Windows Live Messenger, or an SMS message on your mobile phone.  You can also wake up to your upcoming schedule by including an RSS feed of your calendar on your favorite home page like Live.com, or My.MSN.com. Because Windows Live Calendar supports the iCal standard, you can add any ICS-based calendar you find on the Internet so you don’t miss out on your favorite sports games, movie openings or upcoming holidays.  To start, try our holiday calendar list or go to the iCalShare web site.

Worldwide appeal

Finally, this is truly a global calendar built by a truly global team. Our development team spanned Shanghai and Silicon Valley. There were also supporting teams from India, Redmond, Washington, and Ireland.  We made sure you can easily travel the world with Windows Live Calendar. It’s offered in the United States, United Kingdom, Japan, China, India, France, Germany, Spain, and Russia, with many more markets to come.  Events can be created in different time zones from your day-to-day time zone. You can even float your events, so no matter where you are in the world you can have lunch at 12 noon.

Speaking of lunch, one strange tidbit about the Windows Live Calendar team is that every Wednesday, we all “recharge” with a tasty bowl of Japanese udon. So after ~600 bowls of udon, ~600 pairs of chopsticks and lots of hard work, we hope you and your friends will give Windows Live Calendar a spin. Because it’s our initial beta release, there’s going to be many more features coming soon so please send us feedback and tell us what improvements you’d like to see!

Denise Ho

Lead Program Manager – Windows Live Calendar

P.S. Windows Live Calendar is actually a brand new service, totally separate from MSN Calendar. During the beta period, the existing MSN Calendar you’re used to seeing in Hotmail will continue to service all current users who don’t want to try the new beta. To sign up for the new beta, simply go to http://calendar.live.com, sign in, and say yes when asked if you want to start using the beta. Your old calendar data won’t be transferred over to your Windows Live Calendar, but it’ll be waiting for you if you choose to opt out of the beta.