First comes news from LiveSide that Windows Live Office will support one great feature of Office Live Workspace which is Version Support. This means that when a document is edited in the cloud each separate version is saved so the user can go back and use or edit a previous version of a file. Windows Live SkyDrive will be used to store all of the Office documents and alternative versions in a similar way to how it is used to store photos from Windows Live Photos.
Secondly, Tom Warren over at Neowin has just shared some information about what we can expect to be improved in Hotmail, when the Wave 4 update is pushed out for the Windows Live services, which we didn’t already know.
The first and most notable addition to Hotmail will be push email support which will come using Microsoft’s Exchange ActiveSync which is currently supported on over 300 million mobile devices. This will allow users to get new emails immediately and keep other aspects of Windows Live updated such as Calendar and Contacts. As Tom Warren points out this seems to solely aimed at making sure Hotmail is better than Google’s Gmail.
The second Hotmail improvement is being reported as a raft of new security features and methods to make sure that people using Hotmail have the most secure experience on the web. This is being done through several different approaches, one is through “account proofs” which allows users to link a mobile device and/or a PC with their Windows Live account which then allows this device to access the Hotmail account, certainly sounds like a good idea. Another method which we already know about is being able to have a one-time code sent to a mobile device t allow login to the email service from a public computer, after logging out even if the password and username were recorded there wont be a way to access Hotmail as the one-time code will have expired.
Finally, Manan over at The Next Web has just posted a video of the Messenger app for iPhone showing how easy it is to view and share photos and connect to friends from within the rich application. Manan points out the highlights of the app to be:
SkyDrive integration: One can fetch images from SkyDrive and browse the gallery using iPhone’s multi-touch gestures such as zoom and pinch.
Image Editing: The app will allow you to take photographs and allow you to edit and tweak the images.
Windows live News Feed Integration: The application will fetch your Windows Live news feed aggregating your contacts’ updates from various other networks such Flickr and Facebook onto your iPhone screen.
With news yesterday about Windows Live Messenger and then today of Messenger Connect (a rival to Facebook’s Open Graph) Wave 4 is sounding better than I ever thought it would be. Microsoft maybe on the verge of greatness with the impending update to Windows Live, there certainly seems to be no proverbial stone left unturned with everything we know so far and I’m not thought I would be saying that about Microsoft’s online offering a few months back.
