LiveSide - News blog : Calendar

Windows Live Calendar updated, Events discontinued

damaster — Fri, 11 Sep 2009 17:19:00 GMT

Last week, on September 3, 2009, Windows Live Events was officially “retired” and users will no longer be able to create new events using this service, and users are encouraged to download all the files and photos associated with an Event (from the Event’s SkyDrive and Photos) before April 2010. Instead, Microsoft recommend users to use Windows Live Calendar to invite their friends to any events they’re planning. Read this post for further information on how to do this.

In conjunction with the discontinuation of Events, Microsoft also announced today that Windows Live Calendar has been updated, in particular in how Calendar handles your contact’s birthdays. Here’s what we first noticed as part of the change:

Under the “New” menu, instead of having the item “Social event” (which allowed you to create new Windows Live Events directly from Calendar), there is now a “Birthday” menu item. Clicking on it will get you this screen:

Previously, your “Birthday Calendar” would automatically fetch the birthday details from your Windows Live contact list, however you can only enter them using Windows Live People, Messenger, or Mail, and it would (occasionally) sync with your Calendar. With this new update, you can now add birthdays directly from inside the Birthday Calendar and they’ll automatically sync with your contact list! (Note: you cannot add a birthday to an existing contact, our testing showed that adding a birthday this way creates a new contact. However you can also solve this by clicking “Clean up duplicate contacts” right within Calendar to merge the new one with your existing contact). What’s also new in this update is that you can even give it a second reminder to make sure you don’t forget that person’s birthday.

Additionally, you are now allowed to delete your Birthday Calendar, and doing so will not make your contact’s birthday details disappear – in fact, you can add the Birthday calendar back and all the birthdays will still be intact. However, the best improvement must be the addition of a way for you to control when you want Calendar to sync your contact’s birthday with your Birthday Calendar:

Since Windows Live Calendar launched, one of the biggest complaint we’ve seen was the fact that when you add birthday details to your contacts (within Messenger for example), they don’t appear right away in your Birthday Calendar, and you have no idea when it will get synced. With this new release, click “Refresh now” in the screen shown above will sync your contact’s birthday details with your Birthday Calendar right away – no more waiting!

You can see the improved Windows Live Calendar now at http://calendar.live.com!

Windows Live Events “retiring” in 2010

Kip Kniskern — Mon, 03 Aug 2009 20:12:00 GMT

Windows Live Events will be retiring in 2010, and instead you will be able to plan and manage social events all in one place through Windows Live Calendar, according to a post on Windows Live Wire.

In 2010, we’ll retire Windows Live Events entirely. At that time, you will no longer be able to get to any of your old events, and you won’t be able to download and save old event photos and videos.

Beginning in September 2009, you won’t be able to create new events at Events.live.com, but you will still be able to download and save your files and photos. Here’s a video that WL Wire posted to walk you through how to save the stuff you were dumb enough to trust you tried out Windows Live Events with:

(Please visit the site to view this media)

You can also create events on Windows Live Calendar today, although they don’t allow for saving and sharing documents and photos. More on Windows Live Wire.

MSN Calendar To Windows Live Calendar Migration Starting Soon

Sunshine — Thu, 18 Jun 2009 14:03:03 GMT

We read before that this would happen starting March already, but the following announcement appeared on windowslivewire:

It’s almost moving time! We’ve been busy getting Windows Live Calendar ready for when we move all MSN Calendar customers over to the new and improved service on Windows Live.

Over the coming months, we will be moving all existing MSN Calendar customers over to Windows Live Calendar. The move will be gradual, that is, not everyone will see their calendars change on the same day.

So apparently the migration hadn’t started yet. In their article they also outline some features Windows Live Calendar offers over MSN Calendar and let you know that all of your MSN Calendar’s tasks and notes will be migrated into your new Windows Live to-do list. Furthermore they list what you should know for the move: If you only access your MSN Calendar through the web you need not do anything, however if you use Microsoft Office Outlook you will have to make sure you are using the latest version of Outlook Connector (version number 12.0.6414.1000 or greater).

Windows Live Calendar doesn’t support displaying attachments, hence the reminder we posted earlier to save those, or sending reminders to a secondary email address. You will also have to republish or share your calendars again in Windows Live Calendar after the move.

Windows Live Calendar Update!

Sunshine — Wed, 22 Apr 2009 09:02:58 GMT

Have you noticed any problems with Windows Live Calendar, with Birthday Calendars in particular? They should be fixed now, the team posted the following message:

We've just finished updating Live Calendar to fix up some of the problematic parts of Birthday calendars - so they should be up and running now! We've also fixed a couple other bugs, and we're excited to have updated.

Steve Boots notified me of one of these other bugs, namely that there used to be an Invite button on an event addition/edit on a Group calendar. Clicking it would cause a failure since it didn’t belong there. Thanks Steve :)

Have you noticed any of these other bugs that got fixed? Let us know in the comments.

Calendar Updated

Sunshine — Wed, 18 Mar 2009 11:54:13 GMT

Last week Windows Live Calendar got updated, the following bugs got fixed:

Syncing Calendar - You will no longer see errors resulting from a high CPU usage for the couple of minutes after the calendar sync. You'll also see fewer error messages in general - some issues with checking for new calendar updates and meeting requests were fixed.

Shared Calendars - Some of the rules for settings got fixed – now, when you change the calendar settings for a shared calendar, it is updated for all of the other participants.

Thanks to Steve Boots for the tip.

More than Mail - Calendar Update!

Add Windows Live Calendar badge to your blog or website

Kip Kniskern — Fri, 13 Mar 2009 17:07:00 GMT

A nice post over on the Hotmail blog has some simple instructions on how to add a Windows Live Calendar “badge” to your blog or website, using an iframe.

(Not sure why our badge doesn’t show the month calendar, hey it’s only been out for a day)
Update: Apparently this is a bug in IE8 betas, you can run LiveSide in compatibility view to fix

Basically you just make sure to share your calendar publicly, get the ID and the name of the calendar, drop it in a line of code, and drop that in a sidebar widget or where ever you want on your blog or website, like we’ve done here in the left sidebar. Since we’re not masters at configuration, we’ll wait for the next post which will detail how to theme the badge, but nice to be able to place a Windows Live Calendar on the site and then manage it from calendar.live.com. Instructions on the Hotmail blog, with more to come

Reminder: Migration From MSN Calendar To Windows Live Calendar - Save Attachments Before March 1

Sunshine — Sun, 22 Feb 2009 13:26:41 GMT

We already mentioned in January that MSN Calendar users will be moved to the Windows Live Calendar service. This migration of existing MSN Calendar users to the Windows Live Calendar service will start in March. Windows Live Calendar does not support attachments to meetings and appointments. These will be removed from all meetings and appointments during the move. The Windows Live team recommends you save the attachments prior to March 1^st, 2009. If you have been using Outlook Connector 12.0 to synchronize Outlook with your MSN Calendar, you may also be able to retrieve/download a copy of the attachment from the event in your Outlook calendar.

Speaking of Outlook Connector: 12.0 users will be required to upgrade to the 12.1 version, which connects to Windows Live Calendar, starting February 24^th. Starting that date, if you haven’t upgraded already, you will be prompted to upgrade when you boot Outlook and try to sync your Hotmail account. Of course you can upgrade now too if you want, but make sure your calendar is synchronized with the MSN Calendar service before you do so. Whichever way you choose, please restart Outlook after you upgrade so the add-in will be installed correctly.

More information about this move and how to make sure everything migrates smoothly can be found in this blog post and the FAQ.

Meeting Invitations in Windows Live Calendar and Hotmail

damaster — Mon, 09 Feb 2009 13:51:59 GMT

When Calendar was out of beta, we saw a couple of new features when it was released back in January. We also did mention that a new “Meeting invitations” feature will be coming soon to Calendar and Hotmail, finally showing some integration between Calendar and Hotmail (as it should have been!). Here’s what was described on the Hotmail team blog:

In the next few weeks we’ll be adding the ability to send meeting invitations for an event. You’ll be able to invite others to events and users of many calendaring services and software solutions can accept them for automatic addition to their own calendars. These invitations are also a great way to organize quick dinners, dates, or any other event you can think of.

Here’s a screenshot of how it will look like, very similar to the interface in Outlook:

When you receive one of the Meeting Invitations, clicking on “Accept” and “Tentative” will save the request on your Windows Live Calendar. You may also receive a Meeting Cancellation email, and if the meeting was saved on your Calendar, upon receipt of the cancellation email the event will be removed from your Calendar.

We’re unsure whether this will come as part of the upcoming Hotmail update, but the Windows Live Hotmail promotional site is already giving us a few hints on this. Stay tuned at LiveSide for the latest updates!

Thanks to PP2 at LiveSino.net for the heads up!

Automatic “Add to Windows Live Calendar” from your Web Content

Sunshine — Tue, 03 Feb 2009 12:24:38 GMT

Ever wanted to offer your readers the possibility to add a specific event to their Windows Live Calendar? Evan of Windows Live Hotmail team tells you just how to do that.

All it takes for this to work is a single link in your Web page. Here’s what the URL looks like:

http://calendar.live.com/calendar/calendar.aspx?rru=addevent&dtstart=20090106T190000Z&dtend=20090106T200000Z&summary=title&location=location

When users click that link, they will go right to Windows Live Calendar with an “Add Event” dialog pre-filled with your data (see below). All they have to do is click Save. If they’d like, they can also customize reminders, write remarks in the Details, or make any other changes they’d like before saving it. Nifty eh?

So, what is all this gobbledygook in the URL and how do you make it work for you?

Looking at the url we first see rru=addevent. This is required and means the first thing to do after logging in is to bring up the “add new event” form. The additional parameters specify your data:

dtstart Start date and time

dtend End date and time

summary The title of the event

location The location of the event

description The detailed description of the event

So all you need to do is complete the URL with your event’s information in these parameters, making sure it is URL-encoded properly , and you’re ready to go!

Now go ye forth and – no, wait, there’s still one trick here. What about those dates? How do you format the date text? Well, since this was primarily intended for automated use by businesses and developers the date parsing isn’t very forgiving. It accepts dates in a format that you might normally only see buried in a .ics file, something called an ISO8601 date. The format for this is:

YYYYMMDDTHHMMSSZ

YYYY is the 4 digit year, MM is the 2 digit month, DD is the 2 digit day. T is literally the letter T (must be upper case). HHMMSS are hour, minute, and second in 24-hour time. The Z also has to be upper case and it means the entire string is a UTC time. So yes, to use this API you have to first convert your start (and end) time into UTC before you can use this API. You can also omit the Z and leave the time in local time, but this means the event is in “floating” time. A “floating” event at 2pm will happen at 2pm in each and every time zone. It is good if all the visitors are local or if you want an event to occur at midnight no matter where users are located, but not so good for coordinating worldwide events.

Let’s try to make one for MIX09:

1. Convert times to UTC.
How can we do this the easy way? Let’s use an online time converter. First question which time zone to convert from? PST? No no not PST, Daylight Savings Time starts on Sunday, March 8 so we’ll have to use PDT, which is UTC-7:
Start keynote on Day 1 (March 18): 9.00am DST = 16:00 UTC
End Conference, March 20: 3:15pm DST = 22:15 UTC
2. Other needed parameters:
title = MIX09
location = Las Vegas
3. Put everything in the URL:
<a href=http://calendar.live.com/calendar/calendar.aspx?rru=addevent&dtstart=20090318T160000Z&dtend=20090320T221500Z&summary=MIX09&location=Las%20Vegas target="_blank">Add MIX09 to Windows Live Calendar</a>
4. End result
Add MIX09 to Windows Live Calendar

As you can see it gets converted to my time zone when I add this Event to my Windows Live Calendar by clicking the URL.

Some tips for best usage from Evan:

Set the target of the link to be “_new” or “_top”. Calendar uses the entire browser window to avoid layout issues and cross site scripting bugs. So you should plan for that up front – this target will remind you that this link is going to break users out of your UI entirely. And when the user is finished we leave her in the Calendar UI rather than returning her to your site, you may wish to target “_new” to maintain site continuity in the original window/tab.

For the same reason, don’t try to load the link in just one part of your UI if you are using frames. We’ll break out of the frame and take over your whole UI.

Thanks Evan, I’m sure this will come in handy for many of us.

Windows Live Calendar: out of beta, adds features

Kip Kniskern — Thu, 15 Jan 2009 04:34:29 GMT

Yesterday Windows Live Calendar shut down for a bit in order to prepare for their latest incarnation, and today they’re back, having shed the “beta” tag and added some nice new features (we’re talking about the online calendar, at Calendar.live.com – the client calendar in Windows Live Mail doesn’t have these new features, at least not yet).

The Hotmail Team blog has a good writeup on the new features, which include “expandable weeks”, which let you see more (or less) events within a particular week in month view; “Charms”, which at first glance look like a pretty good idea – adding little icons to your events to help them stand out a bit in the calendar:

…Safari web browser support (!!), a convenient “New” button in the header that splits out all ways you can add content (Event, To-do, Social event, Calendar):

…also improved calendar sharing options, a promise that Meeting invitations (for inclusion in other calendar services) are coming soon, and word that MSN Calendar users will be moved to the Windows Live Calendar, but that most of the move will be taken care of automatically, preserving appointments, tasks, etc.

Windows Live Calendar Planned Downtime on Tuesday, January 13

Sunshine — Mon, 12 Jan 2009 20:21:46 GMT

Tomorrow the Windows Live Calendar service will be down for a few hours:

Windows Live Calendar Planned Downtime on Tuesday, January 13

Our team is about to release more cool features to the Windows Live Calendar service. In preparation for this upgrade, we expect 4-5 hours of downtime starting on Tuesday, January 13 at 11 AM Pacific time. You should see the new functionality by Thursday, January 15.

Stay tuned for more news about the great new functionality.

Your friends at Windows Live Calendar

More features! What will those be? We sure will stay tuned and update you as soon as we know more.

Windows Live Calendar Updated – now supports Group Calendar

damaster — Sat, 01 Nov 2008 09:16:10 GMT

We mentioned last time that the Groups Calendar was available already on the dogfood server, but you couldn’t really do anything to it as all you get is an error message and nothing is being loaded into the Calendar. Windows Live Calendar was officially updated today (on the public server) and with it comes support for Groups Calendar feature. If you’ve created any Groups in Messenger, you’ll notice when you login to your calendar today that you might have a few extra calendars on your list – they’d correspond to each of the Groups you are part of. Events you add to the Group Calendar will show up on all other members of the Group.

You can also access the new Group Calendar from within Messenger. When you do, you’ll be taken not to your own personal Calendar site, but the actual Group’s Calendar. But don’t worry, Windows Live Calendar conveniently loads all your personal calendars into the page too, so you can actually see if there’s any conflicts between your Group’s and your own schedules. Very neat feature!

You’ll notice that there’s a few difference here. First of all, there’s no option to “Share” the Group Calendar – it’s automatically shared with the rest of your Group already – but it also means you can’t share the Group Calendar with the public or any other persons not in the Group (unless you add them into your Group). There is also a limitation of only one calendar per Group, so you cannot create multiple calendars for the same Group. Also notice that you cannot directly create “social events” (ie. Windows Live Events) from here, it is most likely because for every Event there’s a Group associated with it – so essentially there’s a separate Group Calendar for that. Confusing huh?

Nevertheless this is a very neat update and gives us a peek into the power of Windows Live Groups. Expect more coming real soon!

P.S. With this update there’s also four new themes – Carbon, Graffiti, Wildflowers, and Moonlight. If you were using one of the original themes previously, and accidently changed your theme here, there’s currently no option to change it back (as the “More themes” link currently doesn’t work yet). But don’t worry, these themes are still available once the new Windows Live Home gets rolled out.

Groups options in Messenger Wave 3 activated – featuring Groups Calendar!

damaster — Sat, 18 Oct 2008 14:53:00 GMT

Today it seems like Microsoft have flipped the switch and turned on the menu for Windows Live Groups in the new Messenger wave 3 beta! When you right-click on a Groups’ name the following option menu will pop-up:

Previously these options were greyed-out, but today they’re being activated and directs you to the appropriate websites associated with the Group (we’ll talk about Groups more in-depth later). Unfortunately most of these links currently directs you to the 404 “We can’t find that page” page you’d get when you visit any of the beta urls we’ve found previously…with the exception of one – Groups Calendar!

Clicking on Calendar in that menu will direct you to your Groups’ Calendar, as shown below. You can even set the theme for your Group here:

Although it doesn’t seem like it’s connecting yet (notice the “Group name goes here” text on the top), at least it gives us an idea of what’s to come! Oh and did we mention the URL it directs you to also gave away the address of the new dogfood Calendar server? Take a look - it works for your own personal Calendar too! Although it seems to be only 11 days newer than the public release, and the only difference I can see are the “correct” links in the wave 3 header, but hey - you’ll never know when they will give us the next surprise!

New MS posts on Windows Live Wave 3 – is blogging back in fashion?

Kip Kniskern — Mon, 22 Sep 2008 20:15:00 GMT

Hopefully the blogging logjam we’ve been experiencing for the past year is beginning to clear, as there are a number of new posts on Windows Live Wave 3 appearing in MS team blogs and also in some of the individual employee blogs. As much as we’ve been critical of the silence, we do want to point out that probably no other tech company supports blogging as much as Microsoft (how many Apple blogs do you read, or even know about?). We think blogging is an important part of Microsoft’s attempt to succeed with software + services, so we want to be encouraging as well as critical.

There have been a lot of posts on Wave 3, you can check in with our “Blogs We Like”, or our “List” for a more complete list of Windows Live blogs, or links to blogs by category. We wanted to feature just a couple here.

The Inside Windows Live Messenger has a nice overview of new features in the new beta. Unfortunately at the moment some of the image links are broken, but hey we’ve had our share of irritating issues, too. Hopefully they’ll be fixed soon.

In the post Steven Abrams starts out noting the new stuff in the beta:

Some of the changes you’ll notice right away:

Glassy: The new Messenger, like the other Windows Live beta programs, is now framed in beautiful Windows Vista “glass,” similar to what you may have seen in Windows Vista.

Clean: We simplified the main window by removing the top toolbar and moving tabs from the side to the bottom. We found people really weren’t using the top toolbar buttons except for Mail, so we found a new spot for Mail, and removed the other toolbar buttons. We also really cleaned up the conversation window, made the toolbars there more streamlined, and gave you more room to IM.

People, people, people: You told us you wanted to see real pictures of people. So, now you can display your contacts’ real display pictures in your contact list. You can choose from 3 different picture sizes, or, no picture at all.

People and web search: You can now search for people and web pages from one field. If you type in someone’s name, we first look to see if they are in your contact list. If they aren’t, you can try searching for their profile on Windows Live, or for other info about them on the web. You can also just type in Movies in 94118 and click web search, and we’ll take you directly to the Internet search results.

Categories and groups: What used to be called “groups” is now called “categories.” The old “groups” were really just categories of your Messenger contacts. This change makes room for a new, more powerful groups feature that you can use across all of the Windows Live services. We’ll talk more about that below.

Quite a few comments on the post already, good work Steven and Inside Windows Live Messenger.

Another post that caught our eye was Dare Obasanjo’s post on Windows Live Calendar. It’s a nice real world example of how Windows Live has taken a big step forward with the new Live Mail calendar integration.

We’ll try to keep you up to date on the best of the blogs (and continue to poke around on our own), but just wanted to point out some nice work by MS bloggers.

Windows Live Calendar Gets New Wave 3 Look And To Do List

Sunshine — Fri, 19 Sep 2008 11:06:00 GMT

The Windows Live Calendar upgrade announced here has now completed. It now has a new look and the thing that one notices right away is that it now has the Wave 3 header. Wave 3 header? Yea the one with themes!

Hmm wonder why they call it scenes in Messenger…

So themes, but what else? New features? Yes, Windows Live Calendar now has a To Do List!

If you click on None in the fields behind Due Date you will be presented with a Calendar in one and a timetable in the other. You can set the priority too, choices are High, Normal and Low.

And there’s my To Do list. Pretty cool!

If you have IE8 beta 2, you may want to set it to compatibility view for Windows Live Calendar.

...(read more)

dtstart	Start date and time
dtend	End date and time
summary	The title of the event
location	The location of the event
description	The detailed description of the event