Tag: Windows Live

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InfoWorld: “Microsoft playing catch-up on Webifying everything”

In InfoWorld Daily today there’s a TechWatch post from Mike Barton (in TechWatch) on the Windows Live QnA service, and more on “a hard look into whether Windows Live is the real deal or not.”

Included is a link to Oliver Rist’s artycle on Windows Live, “What the heck is Windows Live, anyway?” in which he says…

“The here and now [with Windows Live] — for businesses, anyway — is a nice set of security and diagnostic tools and a very competitive Web and e-mail hosting service.”

But as a consumer, I’ll add that in addition to sometimes using the various Live services in Beta, I regularly use Live Search (‘though I like Addy Santo’s MSN Search vs. Google page), Live.com as my home page, Live Mail (as my Hotmail accounts have been updated), Live Local (see this post), and Live Messenger.

From the post today…

“OK, so it is Microsoft playing catch-up on Webifying everything. Too bad Google gets all the glory in this PR-centric world. The ex-MS PR hack Robert Scoble makes some points in A Google Vs. Microsoft Double Standard?, noting Google’s edge with Web-centric bloggers following its media home run with news of its short-on-beef Office rival package yesterday.”

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Businesses call you with Windows Live Call Beta

Talk about being slow to the game… you know you missed the press release when your eight year old calls you and asks “hey, what’s this thing that I found on Windows Live?”


When you search for a business on Windows Live Local, click on the business name in the left-hand column to open a window with more info, and you’ll see a “call for free” option that lets you initiate a free call with the business….


              



               Microsoft Corporation


               Microsoft Corporati3350 157th Ave NE, Redmond, WA 98052
               (425) 882-8080 Call For Free    (800) 892-3181 (Toll Free Number)


In the resulting window that opens, just type in your phone number and Windows Live sets up the call to the business and forwards it to your number. It’s just that simple… no long set up procedure. From the Windows Live Help web site…



“When you see the Call for Free name on a business’ website, you can use Call for Free to make a free telephone call to the business, even long-distance. To place a free telephone call to a business:”


  1. Click Call for Free on the business’ website.

  2. In the Call for Free box, enter the ten-digit telephone number of the telephone you want to use for the call, and then click Call. At present, only U.S. telephone numbers are supported.

  3. After a few moments, your telephone rings, and you are connected with the participating business. Click Close to close the Call for Free window.

This beta version of Windows Live Call for Free is US only as far as I can find, and is great when you don’t want to make what would be a toll call to the business. Sorry, Canada.


As noted on Microsoft Watch, the Feedback.Live.Com site lists more than 40 Windows Live services and sites, as Windows Live Platform Product Planner Ken Levy blogged.


It would be great if you could add a “Windows Live Local Calls” page to your Windows Live home page, and save these calls as a directory for regularly-made phone calls. And good if you could select “call for free” and make a call from the hover window you see when you mouse over the business listing in the results list, rather than having to open a new window.


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Where are your files archived? Is “Live Drive” coming soon?

A few months ago I was lamenting and thinking of an easy-to-use, online storage in the cloud service: “Give me a file share in the cloud where I can regularly back up critical files (photos, email and contacts) off-site… and make the files (or at least the recoverable image) accessible over the Internet as well should the whole PC disappear.”


Now, there’s more talk, as reported by ZDNet news in Oz, about LiveDrive:



“Speaking at a blogger’s breakfast before the opening of Microsoft’s Tech Ed conference in Sydney on Tuesday, technical specialist John Hodgson said that the basic Live Drive was likely to include around 2 gigabytes of storage for free. Additional storage capacity will be available for purchase, he said, though pricing and final release dates haven’t been announced.”


For our use, 2 GB is just about enough to back up my current non media documents for each of our home PCs… but not our archive of photos, scans, audio and video. That’s OK, as with OneCare and our broadband connection, I imagine that I will be able to schedule an automated back-up directly to the cloud, selecting Live Drive as one of the available storage devices in the set-up.


Great if this could be one of several options, rather than the only “save to” option: that would let me still back up regularly to our home server as well as a redundant back-up to the cloud.


As for my solution with larger files (especially those I want to keep “forever”) is to make a couple of redundant archives. This includes…



  • regularly scheduled back-ups with OneCare to my shared, networked Buffalo hard drive, which includes a complete back up of all machines with all files,

  • important family files – photos and videos of the kids, art and music, and

  • a small portable drive as well as DVDs for long-term storage in our off-site storage in an inexpensive safe deposit box (so that’s what you use them for…).

I also rely on PhotoWorks (originally known as Seattle Film Works) which originally scanned and archived all of our developed film images. Now, as long as I place an order a couple of times a year (cards, prints of digital images), they maintain the archive on their system. That’s not hard to do as I find that for larger than 4×6″ prints (or lots of ’em), I regularly upload my favourite digital images for printing… and then those images are also archived for safe keeping. 


digg this


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My MSN Support experience

OK, it’s almost the weekend and I decided to sign up for a Windows Live beta off of the address I have linked to my IM account.


Nope, not recognized.


So Friday night I sent in a text request via a form off of the MSN support page





 Support


Thank you for contacting Microsoft Passport Network



E-mail Support


Thank you for submitting your issue to Support.


A support representative will reply to your message.

Your Support Ticket Number:

For reference, please print this page or write down your support ticket number. Use this number when communicating with Support about this issue.

A number would have been nice. ; )


In the end, I received help from Passport Support and solved the problem.


The frustrating point is the Support team for Passport and the Windows Live beta teams aren’t apparently connected very well — their mutual success is connected through the most basic of experiences — yet it took the customer (me) to make the connection. I ended up having to send two separate email trails to two separate Microsoft groups. And last, it appeared that neither group had access to the other’s backstory on the support call.