As you may have noted, LiveSide recently added the Windows Live Translator tool (tell us what you think).
We actually use quite a list of Windows Live products at LiveSide, some we've been using for quite a while. So here's our list, along with some notes on how the products are used, and some non Windows Live products we can't seem to do without.
On the site:
Some more we're toying with:
- Messenger IM Control: easy technically to implement, a little harder to dedicate the time to chat - we're thinking about this.
- Windows Live Events: Should we have a LiveSide birthday party? (2 years in January).
- Windows Live Calendar: Added a Calendar, but not much on it yet.
Managing LiveSide:
- Windows Live Mail: For managing multiple Hotmail accounts so we can keep track of your tips and feedback.
- Windows Live Writer: Using it to write this blog post.
- Live Search Maps collections: 200 of our closest friends are on LiveSide Stickers Around the World!
Other tools we find useful:
- Feedburner: manages our rss feed, provides statistical information on our rss readership. Also manages rss ads, a nice bonus.
- Google Analytics: website traffic information - we're still waiting for a Gatineau invitation.
- Community Server: We wish it was easier to maintain, and the featureset is overkill, but it has served us well.
- Federated Media ads: We don't make much money running LiveSide, but we seem to be keeping up with the bills.
- Nick of NB Development: our CS guru, simply not possible for us to run on CS without some help, and Nick has been great.
- 1and1.com: After tipping over a few times last year, we moved to 1and1, on Windows Server 2003 and a dedicated box, and haven't had a problem since.