Outlook Connector, both the 32 and 64bit versions, were updated today, and you can get them here:

• Outlook Hotmail Connector 32-bit
• Outlook Hotmail Connector 64-bit

I had to uninstall the previous version (14.0.5118.4000) to get the new one (14.0.5118.5000) to install, and have been switching back and forth between Outlook and Windows Live Mail (back to Mail for the moment), so not sure exactly what has changed.

If you use Outlook and haven’t been using the Connector, here’s an overview from the download site:

With Microsoft Outlook Hotmail Connector 32-bit, you can use Microsoft Office Outlook 2003, Microsoft Office Outlook 2007 or Microsoft Office Outlook 2010 to access and manage your Microsoft Windows Live Hotmail or Microsoft Office Live Mail accounts, including e-mail messages, contacts and calendars for free!
Outlook Hotmail Connector enables you to use your Live Hotmail accounts within Outlook:

• Read and send your Office Live Mail/Windows Live Hotmail e-mail messages.
• Manage your contacts in Windows Live Hotmail.
• Use advanced options for blocking junk e-mail messages.
• Manage multiple e-mail accounts in one place.
• Manage, and synchronize multiple calendars, including shared calendars to Windows Live Calendar from Outlook.

If you use the Outlook Hotmail Connector with Outlook 2010 you gain these additional benefits:

• Your Safe Sender List/Blocked sender list/Safe Recipient lists are synchronized between Outlook and Hotmail.
• Send/receive works like your other Outlook accounts.
• Your Hotmail account status appears in the Outlook status bar.
• Rules work with the Hotmail account in Outlook even if it’s not your primary account.

Special thanks to our friend Rich at WindowsObserver.com for catching this earlier today, great job as always!

Sad to say that the US education system is in a bit of a sad state currently, but Bing is trying to do something about it, launching a new site and new initiative focused “providing information and resources to learn, a community platform to connect, and tools and initiatives to act:

LET'S REDU from Redu on Vimeo.

Some of the statistics are pretty sobering:

Why all the fuss?

1.2+ Million

The number of students that drop out of school every year. That’s more than 6,000 students every school day and one every 26 seconds.

53%

Percentage of U.S. students expected to graduate high school in the 50 largest cities.

18th Place

Ranking of 12th graders in combined mathematics and science assessments against 21 other countries.

1+ Million

Number of veteran teachers who are nearing retirement. America will need 2 million new teachers in the next decade.

One in Six

Public School Students attend a High-Poverty School

You can learn more, and join it, at www.bing.com/redu. 

Yesterday I attended the very first Open@4 Press Event at Microsoft headquarters here in the Netherlands. Open@4 (the meets start at 4 PM) are informal press meetings to be held quarterly, with a different topic each time. This time the topic was Cloud Computing. What can Cloud Services do for you?

Introduction

First there was a general introduction about the Cloud and Microsoft Cloud Services.

IaaS – Infrastructure as a Service (to move to)
Infrastructure and storage capacity to host and manage applications and services.
PaaS – Platform as a Service (to build on)
Windows Azure is a platform existing of an operating system, (relational) database and web services with on-demand scalability (pay for what you use).
SaaS – Software as a Service (to use)
Subscription based on-demand applications and services. For examples:
- Business productivity Online Suite (BPOS)
- Exchange Hosted Services
- Microsoft Dynamics CRM Online
- Office Web Apps
Also think about Hotmail, Messenger, Windows Update, MSN, Bing and Xbox Live.

There are 3 kinds of Clouds:
- Public (all can see)
- Personal (only I + those I allow can see) 
- Private (think Corporate, employees only)

Announcements

There were also some announcements made. First announcement made was a partnership agreement with Regus in the Netherlands: Customers of Regus in the Netherlands will be able to make (fully web based) use of BPOS.

Furthermore we can expect the following in the next months:
- Windows Live Release 4
- Windows Intune - PC management client, currently in beta
- Dynamics CRM Online - Customer Relationship Management
- Business Online Services
- Live@EDU
- Windows Azure Appliance – turnkey cloud platform that customers can deploy in their own datacenter

Windows Live

After the introduction and announcements it got divided into 3 groups (Business, Customer….).

Of course I attended the Customer session as this was about Windows Live. A presentation was given about the new Windows Live Messenger and Hotmail.

Taking notice of anything that could be new I only found one thing you may or may not have discovered yourself yet, if you are using the beta: Starting this week you can also find MSN in Messenger’s full view, so you can keep up-to-date with the latest news!

Afterwards there was some time to mingle/network. I very much enjoyed this informal meet and look forward to the next one.