LiveSide - News blog : Events

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.

Wave 3: Windows Live Mail - Calendar, Calendar, Calendar (And More)

Kip Kniskern — Wed, 17 Sep 2008 02:08:00 GMT

When you install Windows Live Mail, either for the first time or as an upgrade to an older version, go straight to Calendar. For the first time, Windows Live has a complete, working, beautiful, and fun calendar.

First of all, it’s beautiful. Clean, elegant, simple. Even though it works in harmony with the online Windows Live Calendar, you’ll want to use the Live Mail version (and that’s the beauty of software + services!).

While Google Calendar has taken over much of the early adopter market share, Windows Live had to wait for Feedsync to get to a point where it could be deployed. That’s been painful in the short term. In the long run, it’s a calendar (and a sync mechanism) worth waiting for.

Creating an event is simple, just click on a day and start filling out information:

Or you can enter an email directly as a Calendar event:

Just right click on an email, add to calendar, and input the date information, and save. Once you do, you just click on the event on your calendar, and the body of the email is included.

And then of course all of the information you’ve entered into your Windows Live Calendar from Live Mail is available anywhere you can log into www.calendar.live.com, including that email you linked. Online, you just mouseover to see the info from the email (but it’s not as pretty!):

The online Windows Live calendar, with sharing via invitation or publicly, anywhere access, and connection to other calendars is still there of course, but now you can control it from your desktop. Of course you can also create a Windows Live Event online, and add it to your calendar. At this point that functionality is pretty basic, but we’ll see how much and how soon that changes ;).

Oh, and yes there is more in the new Windows Live Mail. Aside from a bit of a facelift, and what unscientifically seems to be much snappier performance, there’s a new button to “Check Names and Email”, and some improvements to the Newsreader (long newsgroup names now wrap, instead of being cut off, for one). There will be new functionality around Photo Emails once you send them, but the basic functions in Windows Live Mail remain the same. And that’s good.

We’ve been using Windows Live Mail to manage our LiveSide email for our individual accounts and for feedback and tips, and it already has been far superior to Outlook, even with the Connector, for managing multiple Hotmail accounts. Now with better performance and a new calendar, we’re even happier.

Read more LiveSide reviews on the new Windows Live betas:

Wave 3: Windows Live Movie Maker Beta

Wave 3: Windows Live Writer – A First Look

Wave 3- Windows Live Messenger 9 Beta – What’s New- A Comparison With 8.5

Wave 3: Windows Live Photo Gallery – New Features

Windows Live Wave 3 beta urls show up

Chris — Wed, 10 Sep 2008 22:38:11 GMT

A couple of weeks ago we started noticing an interesting referrer popping up in the stats for some of our posts. Turns out Microsoft moved their Wave 3 services from the dogfood servers onto beta servers, and as a result some MSFT employees were clicking through to us from http://home-beta.live.com. You won’t be able to sign in to any of the beta sites yet if you’re not on the approved list (the betas haven’t started yet if you’re worried), but here’s a few gems we learnt while digging around.

Note – as the new sites are locked down, these are just features we’ve spotted/inferred from looking around the existing sites that are running side-by-side. What’s great is that now new features can be tested before being rolled out to the general public, something which Spaces has needed ever since one of its updates rendered the service unusable for several weeks.

Windows Live Home Beta (http://home-beta.live.com) – As mentioned above, softies are clicking through to us from this site, thanks to the new homepage having default groups of feeds that users can subscribe to. Looks like this new homepage could have similar features to my.live.com, so it’ll be interesting to see how much functionality they duplicate.

Windows Live Profile Beta (http://profile-beta.live.com) – Sorry Jason and Sabina but you’re our demos (everybody else had personal photos up). You can see from these feeds that photo albums are now stored on Skydrive. That means you can now use your Skydrive storage across multiple services, which should please a lot of people.

Windows Live Photos Beta (http://photos-beta.live.com) – The front-end user interface to the photos stored on Skydrive, see below. This means you now start to share your 5GB of storage across Windows Live services, which hopefully is a sign of further consolidation in the storage area. Lets face it, we have too much scattered storage already (about 30GB worth!)

Windows Live Skydrive Beta (http://skydrive-beta.live.com) – With photos going to be stored on Skydrive, there’s more privacy options you can set, as shown by the new icon below. This means photos won’t necessarily be visible to the public, giving users some control over content that’s currently lacking in the existing Spaces photo albums.

And for completeness, the urls of the other beta sites:

Windows Live Groups Beta (http://groups-beta.live.com), Windows Live Spaces Beta (http://spaces-beta.live.com) and Windows Live Events Beta (http://events-beta.live.com)

Let us know if you find anything: tips [at] liveside d0t net

More on Wave 3: Windows Live Writer to support YouTube, Events and Photo Albums

damaster — Sat, 06 Sep 2008 14:52:00 GMT

Having told you about what's coming in Messenger, Mail, Movie Maker and Photo Gallery, it's now time to cover the next one in the series: Windows Live Writer. Let us start off with a screenshot for you:

We've noticed on the right pane that you can now insert "Events" (Windows Live Events?) and "Photo Albums" into your blogs. From the screenshot it's already showing what it will look like when you insert a Photo Album into your blog post - it even includes an option for slideshows.

The next screenshot shows that Windows Live Writer now supports directly uploading videos onto YouTube! Also take note of the tab "From Video Source" - the current version of Writer only mentions "From Soapbox", meaning the new version will support inserting videos from other video sources other than Soapbox as well. Keep in mind that Movie Maker will also support uploading videos onto MSN Soapbox, YouTube and other video sharing websites.

Thanks to Picturepan2 from LiveSino again for the info!

Program to Windows Live Events? The Create Events API

Kip Kniskern — Wed, 17 Oct 2007 11:00:00 GMT

Rob Dolin, a Program Manager on the Spaces team, posts tonite with an example of a programmatically created Windows Live Event:

API Details
The link should have taken you to an event create page with all of the specified parameters pre-populated. Yep, it’s a long link, but it’s intended to show all of the parameters (most of which are optional.) Here’s the link in a more read-able format:

http://spaces.live.com/api.aspx
?wx_action=createEvent
&wx_targetSite=eventSpace
&wxp_name=Movie+Night:+Live+Free+or+Die+Hard
&wxp_alias=livefreeordiehard
&wxp_contactName=John+Smith
&wxp_contactPhone=206-555-1212
&wxp_location=Space+Needle
&wxp_address=4th+Ave.+and+Broad+St.+in+Seattle
&wxp_latlong=47.62061,-122.34942
&wxp_mapType=h
&wxp_mapZoom=18
&wxp_description=%3cimg%20src='http://entimg.msn.com/i/150/mo/OneSheets/new3/LiveFreeorDieHard.jpg'%3e
&wxp_template=IIEventOscarParty.xml

As you can see, parameters are URL encoded. The mapping parameters (mapType, mapZoom) are consistent with Virtual Earth. Check out their interactive SDK for more info.

Dolin goes on to offer some ideas for potential uses, and a PS on RSS:

RSS
P.S. Publicly accessible events also include an RSS feed. You can see this by adding /feed.rss to the event’s URL AND in additional to basic RSS elements like <title>, <link>, <description>, and <pubDate>; <geo> and <georss> elements are also included.

...read more on the Spaces Developer Platform blog.

With all of the talk about APIs (Application Programming Interface) and Microsoft lately, this is an interesting if not very well publicized development. As of yet there's no mention of this functionality on Dev.live.com or in the Windows Live SDK. Certainly that must be changing soon.

Thanks to ViaWindowsLive for blogrolling this, although unlike Angus we think you should keep on reading LiveSide, too ;)

Spaces, SkyDrive, Events: Changes in the works

Kip Kniskern — Thu, 11 Oct 2007 14:48:00 GMT

Looks like some of the changes we're expecting are starting to roll out in Spaces land - new SkyDrive integration, a changed Spaces "What's New" page, and more Events sightings (although no sign of the product itself, yet).

Jamie T. spotted a number of the changes and features them in two posts on his Spaces blog: In the post New Spaces home page, Jamie points out a number of Facebook like features that we're not seeing here, yet, including updates to blog entries, upcoming birthdays (more on that in a bit), new friends of friends including an "Invite as friend" link, and a whole series of changes around SkyDrive. We're not seeing all of the changes here, yet, but on our LiveSide Spaces site we do have a new link to SkyDrive from the "What's New" page

(Update: doh, looks like the SkyDrive/Spaces integration has been around for a bit - maybe I should read LiveSide ;). There is more to say on this subject, stay tuned):

...and a corresponding module on our Spaces site itself:

Jamie also points out a link to Events that again he is seeing but we aren't here yet, a link to create an Event from the upcoming birthdays box:

Stay tuned to LiveSide for the latest on some pretty cool new stuff coming our way soon.

Ramping up for Windows Live Events (and maybe Groups too?)

Chris — Mon, 08 Oct 2007 14:30:00 GMT

Remember the Wave 2 launch dates given last month by Microsoft France? It seems that Windows Live Events could be just around the corner after a link to the service was spotted in a Live Search cached page. What makes this all the more interesting is the cached version of Spaces was running on build 1347, the current build running on spaces.live.com is only 1345.

Our friends over at Wagged have also been a little jumpy recently, conducting searches for Windows Live Events to see what information is already out. It seems like they are definitely ramping up for something over in Redmond.

And while we're on the topic of Spaces, there's also been some chatter on an MSN Groups upgrade to Windows Live Groups. The Wikipedia entry on it is well worth reading, thanks again to Live Search doing a great job in caching the non-public facing Groups homepage. Rock on the Live Search team.

Windows Live Wave 2 launch in November says Microsoft France

Chris — Fri, 14 Sep 2007 06:19:00 GMT

At a briefing given to French press yesterday about Microsoft's calendar year so far, Laurent Delaporte VP for Microsoft France kindly gave the Windows Live Wave 2 launch as November 2007. This will include the following:

Software - Messenger 8.5, Mail, Writer, Photo Gallery, Family Safety
Services - Hotmail, Events, Skydrive and Live Search 2.0
Mobile - Nothing until 2008

Interesting is the inclusion of Windows Live Events availability, though there have been several hints in the past few weeks that it was approaching. To recap:

"Windows Live Events will enable users to share and plan different types of Events happening around them in compelling ways while collaborating with other services like calendar [and] spaces."

In layman's terms, the service will allow users to plan and manage their own events, add them to their Space, receive Alerts and eventually integrate with other Windows Live services such as Calendar. If you're a Facebook user the concept shouldn't seem too strange, however the integration across services will be a key strength.

So according to Monsieur Delaporte, Skydrive will go v1 in November, Windows Live Events will make an appearance by then, and with Searchification happening on September 26th, the public beta for Live Search 2.0 looks to be only 2 months at most. We all know which service he didn't mention! (hint) Looks like we're in for a busy few months :)

Windows Live Calendar and Events sightings, coming soon?

Kip Kniskern — Sat, 25 Aug 2007 21:56:00 GMT

Our friend PicturePan2 just noticed something interesting over at home.live.com, newly added icons for Windows Live Calendar, and what we assume is Windows Live Events:

(you won't see these unless you are signed out of home.live.com)

The new icons, a calendar page and a calendar with balloons (nice!), seem to give more evidence that Calendar and Events are coming soon. We can't wait!

PS: There's also a few g-links running around too, similar to the ones in the Hotmail and Spaces headings. Check out http://g.live.com/9uxp9en-us/hpg_hdr10 (Error - Events can't be found)
http://g.live.com/9uxp9en-us/hpg_hdr19 (Error - Events can't be found)

Get ready for a new Live.com - Windows Live Home

Chris — Wed, 08 Aug 2007 11:29:00 GMT

At a briefing given to Japanese press about Windows Live, Tetuya Onoda (Windows Live Director) held up a nice big picture of the new Windows Live Homepage that looks set to replace the existing personalised Live.com page. Featuring the new Wave 2 UI, the portal acts as a true Windows Live Home, featuring modules that allow you to monitor and access the Windows Live services that matter to you. A few examples of this cross-service integration are:

Providing access to your emails and contacts through Windows Live Hotmail
Showing the upcoming calendar items from your Windows Live Calendar
Allowing blog and photo publishing direct to your Windows Live Space
Showing the status of Windows Live OneCare installed on your home pc

Also of note is the inclusion of links to Folders/Skydrive and Windows Live Events, though whether any interaction is available directly from your homepage remains to be seen. Users can also customise the weather display shown in the top left of the screen. We'd love to have the ability to remotely run a OneCare virus scan or upload a file to Skydrive, however as we saw with the original Live.com development, good performance right from the initial availability is very important.

As always, the appearance and functionality of the final product may differ slightly from that shown. Currently http://home.live.com/ redirects to the personalised live.com homepage.

The press briefing also mentioned some other juicy bits, including single sign-on for Windows Live ID (sign in to one passport and be able to use any others you might have), Windows Live Skydrive, and Windows Live Drive. Of course as with Windows Vista SP1 they could all be typos, maybe.

Thanks for a great tip hey07.

Microsoft to extend social networking with Windows Live Events

Chris — Tue, 10 Jul 2007 04:51:00 GMT

Rolling straight on from Windows Live Folders and Photo Gallery it looks like the Windows Live teams have yet another new service up their sleeves. Windows Live Events looks set to fill a gap in the current Windows Live portfolio, adding functionality to the rather basic social networking features that currently exist as part of Windows Live Spaces.

"Windows Live Events will enable users to share and plan different types of Events happening around them in compelling ways while collaborating with other services like calendar [and] spaces."

Mike Arrington recently posted about the new social networking products being made by Yahoo and Google, with Jeremy Zawodny from Yahoo saying "everyone is scrambling to catch up with facebook..." - how right he is. Its generally acknowledged that Microsoft often plays catchup, ironically the same is now true of Google.

While Facebook has popularised the social events scene, the power of Windows Live exists in the offering of connected services. Add in Spaces, Calendar and Alerts integration to an events service and you instantly have a very powerful product. With the number of users Windows Live Spaces wields, it will surely be a popular one too. That said, it'll be interesting to see if Microsoft choses to leverage the new Facebook Developer Platform and tie in Windows Live Events with Facebook Events. The possibilities for a "connected" set of services such as these is exciting, and something Microsoft desparately needs to do if it wants to win back the Facebook generation.