As a result of registering your domain, you may receive e-mail or direct mail from a third party that appears at first glance to be a billing statement or an invoice related to the registration of your domain name.  Upon closer examination, it is actually a solicitation for services related to your domain name (for example, search engine optimization).  Please note that the domain you registered through Microsoft Office Live is free and carries no hidden fees.  Microsoft will not send you unsolicited mail requesting credit card numbers, passwords, or other sensitive information. We take your privacy very seriously and pledge not to sell your personal information to any third parties.  That said, the registrant information for your domain name is available in a public database (see http://www.icann.org/faq/#whois), regardless of whom you registered your domain with.  Domain name registrant information is public for several good reasons, including: 1) rapid resolution of technical problems; 2) enforcement of consumer protection, trademark, and other laws; and 3) reduction of fraudulent activities. But, because of this public availability, third-parties do have access to your name, contact information and domain name for their marketing communications, some of which can be misleading.  So, please read the small print.

 

 

       Dean Nicolls
       Office Live Product Manager

We have just completed a ‘Refresh’ of our Beta of Office Live and I wanted to let everyone know what’s new.  In the world of online services it is much easier to update your system to the benefit of all your customers (no need to download a service pack like with ‘box software’J)  We shipped a few new ‘customer visible’ features and several back-end improvements but I’ll focus mostly on what is visible to the customer in this posting.

 

Essentials now fully supports Outlook Connector

            Essentials inboxes now have email, contacts, and calendar access enabled for Microsoft Office Outlook connector.  What is that you say?  Outlook Connector (download it here if you have inbox created via your Essentials subscription) is an add-on for Outlook which will allow you to connect directly to your Office Live inbox using Microsoft Office Outlook 2002 (XP) or later.  Once connected you can read and write email as well as access your contacts and calendar using Outlook.  Using Outlook connector you can always be in sync with your Office Live Inbox, have offline access to your information, and access any number of Office Live Essentials created inboxes from one central place (simply add the multiple email accounts to Outlook).  A link to download Outlook Connector will also be available in the Member Center if you have an inbox created in an Essentials subscription.  So if you’re already an Essentials customer, try it out today; if you’re a Basics subscriber maybe this will be the reason to upgrade to Essentials ;)

 

If you are already a customer today the two links below provide some more information specific to Outlook Connector and Office Live (sorry, you have to be a logged-in customer to view these links):  Benefits of Outlook Connector& Getting Started with Outlook Connector. 

 

Owners now get a monthly report on their site

            Each month the owner of the subscription should look to their inbox for an Activity Report.  This report has a summary of information available directly on the Office Live site but neatly packaged to give you a quick overview of what’s been happening in the last month on your business site.  There are different reports for Basics, Collaboration, and Essentials but the basic information given is:

• Storage and bandwidth used for your web site
• Unique visitors and page views for your web site
• Search engines and keywords for the month
• Referring domains and sites for the month
• # of email accounts utilized
• Users and roles for your shared sites (Collaboration owners only)
• Names and links for your shared sites (Collaboration owners only)

 Our emails to you can be updated faster

            This is more of a backend change but the emails you receive (Welcome mails, alerts about your storage limits, etc) can now be updated much more rapidly to better serve the customer.  So, if there are parts of the mails you receive today that you find confusing or you have suggestions to improve the mails please let us know!

 

Backend changes to help the future

            We have also made a large number of backend changes which will be the foundation for changes to come later.  Today we are still in Beta but in the not-so-distant future we will be out of Beta and fully released.  When that happens we’ll have many new features and we plan to have many, many more over the years to come!  But, to accomplish all this future growth we need to lay a solid foundation.  Some of the first major blocks of that foundation were put in place with this refresh of Office Live

 

So there you have it, a few new features for customers and some important steps towards the future.  If you want to see these new features in action sign-up for Office Live today!  Or if you are already a subscriber look to your inbox (directly from Outlook if you’ve got Essentials and download the connector) for the Activity report and enjoy!  And, as always we appreciate your feedback so drop me an email or post a reply to the community site.  To get things started I’ve also posted this entry to the Feedback community forum for Office Live.

 

-- Matt Rolak, SDET Lead

Matthew.Rolak@microsoft.com