|
» Strona g-ówna : Web2
Informacji szukaj w: google yahoo msn
Wed, 24 Sep 2008 16:17:31
Last week, we released a Beta version of Windows Live Mail – and one of the main reasons we do that is to get some feedback from our customers on the issues they’re seeing, what they like and don’t like, what features they’d like to see, etc… In a nutshell, we want our customers to tell us what they think! So, if we’re going to ask you to send us feedback on our product, we had better offer you ways to do that, right? Right – and that’s what this blog post is essentially about. We have a few common ways to get feedback from our customers, and I wanted to take a minute to go through all those so you will know where you should go for the different types of info you might want to share with us about the latest release. If you aren’t new to the Beta program, most of this info likely won’t be new to you. If you are new, however, I hope the information below will be helpful to you when deciding how to send issues to the product team. NewsgroupThis is where you should go if you want to discuss a specific issue that you’re seeing in the product with other beta testers and the product team. The product team spends a lot of time here, particularly during Beta releases, to look into the issues that you all are describing. Please rest assured that even though you might not see a response from someone on the product team for every issue, we are looking at them and filing them away so we can do further investigation. There are two ways to access our public newsgroup… The first is through the web. The second is by using Windows Live Mail as your newsreader. Getting this setup is really simple – here are the steps you should follow: 1. Launch Windows Live Mail and click on “Newsgroups” in the lower-left corner 2. In the left pane, there is an option for “Microsoft Communities” – click on that and click on the “View Newsgroups” button. 3. search for “Windows Live Mail” and double click on the option for microsoft.public.windows.live.mail.desktop and click OK to close the dialog box That’s it! SupportIf you’re experiencing an issue that is blocking you from using the product and you need an immediate resolution (i.e. you can’t sign in, you’re getting sync errors, etc…), you should contact our support team for help. If it’s not critical and it’s just a bug in the Beta product that you want the product team to know about, then the newsgroup is probably the better place to go for this. Follow this link to get to our support page. When there, fill out the form with all your details and someone from our Support team should get back to you shortly to help resolve the issue or gather more information from you if necessary. FeedbackThis is where you should go when you just want to send us your thoughts about the product as a whole, or about specific features (good/bad, I like this feature/I hate this feature, I’d like to see this in the feature/I wish you’d take this out of the feature, etc…). You can get to the feedback site by going through our Help menu: Help –> Send feedback… One important thing to note about this feedback option… The product team won’t be able to respond to you through this channel. All of your personal information (like email, name, etc…) is stripped from your feedback so we have no way of contacting you to gather more information. So, if you are reporting a problem that you might need help with, please use the newsgroups or support instead. Hope this was helpful! Tanja – Windows Live Mail Program Manager Wed, 01 Oct 2008 17:40:48
Tanja talked about many of the basics of the Calendar feature in her first post about the new Windows Live Mail Beta. In this post, I wanted to call out three of more powerful features, specifically: · Reminders · Importing & subscribing · Sharing ÂReceiving remindersHaving one place to track all your upcoming events, appointments, and birthdays is great, but it’s even better when that place reminds you about them. If you’re signed in to Windows Live Mail Beta, you can receive calendar reminders in three ways: 1. In email 2. On your mobile phone 3. In Windows Live Messenger, if you’re signed in with the same account that has your calendar info By default, you will receive reminders in email, but if you’d like to receive them on your phone or in Messenger, that’s easy to configure. Just click here: You might need to sign in on the web page that opens, then just select your preferred delivery methods, and you’re done!  Importing calendars & Subscribing to calendarsWindows Live Mail doesn’t currently include entry points to import or subscribe to calendars, but we will show those calendars once you’ve imported them or subscribed to them via Windows Live Calendar (http://calendar.live.com). For example, let’s say you wanted to subscribe to a Seattle Seahawks game schedule. In Windows Live Calendar, click on Subscribe: Then, on the “Import or subscribe to a calendar” web page, fill in the calendar URL, type the calendar name you’d like, pick a color, and click “Subscribe to calendar.” Voila! The calendar now appears in your Windows Live Calendar list: And, when you go back to Windows Live Mail, there it is as well: Note that if you don’t see the new calendar, it means Windows Live Mail needs to sync – the easiest way to force that is to go to your Inbox and then back to Calendar. You could also select “Sync all calendars” on the Tools menu. To import a calendar, you would follow the same process, just select the “Import from an ICS file” on the “Import or subscribe to a calendar” web page. Importing a calendar is a onetime operation and the events will not be updated when changed on the original calendar. Importing is a great mechanism for moving calendar data to Windows Live from another online calendar product. Search help in your previous calendar for “export ical” to learn how to save your calendar into an ics file which Windows Live Calendar can import.  Sharing calendarsWe often hear users clamoring for the ability to share a calendar with spouses, friends, or co-workers. Through Windows Live Calendar, you can do this, and Windows Live Mail will show those calendars and give you full power to edit them and keep them up-to-date. For example, I’ve got a calendar where I track my daughters’ activities (gymnastics, art class, and the like) and it’s been super useful for me to share that with my husband. Here’s how I did that: In Windows Live Calendar, I clicked on “Share” and selected the Girls calendar: On the “Sharing settings” page, I selected the “Share this calendar” radio button and the “Share your calendar with friends and family” checkbox. I typed in my husband’s email address and selected which permission level to give him. I clicked “Save” and was done. My husband then received an email inviting him to share the calendar, he accepted, and the Girls calendar showed up in his calendar list in both Windows Live Calendar and Windows Live Mail. In Windows Live Mail, we’re both able to add events or edit events, really helping the two of us make sure we’ve got our girls in the right place at the right time each week. So, there you go – hope this helps you take further advantage of Windows Live’s new calendar features. And thanks, as always, for being a beta user! Stacia Thu, 09 Oct 2008 00:54:18
One of the things that we think makes Windows Live Mail (and Windows Live in general) a great product is that we do a lot of work to make sure our product works for people around the world. One of my fellow PMs Laurence Kancherla is part of the Windows Live International team, which is dedicated to making sure that Mail and all Windows Live products work great for users globally. One element of that which she and I have been working on is spellchecking. Language Support A little while ago, Windows Live Mail added support for spellchecking in several new languages. Windows Live Mail now supports spellchecking in English, French, German, Korean, Dutch, Spanish, Turkish, Portuguese (Brazil) and Italian! We think spellchecking is an important aspect of using email and we’re glad to offer it to more of our users. Additionally, Windows Live Mail has the ability to check with Microsoft’s servers to see if there are any new languages available for spellchecking – this means that if you use a computer with one of these new languages, you’ve probably already been asked if you wanted to spellcheck in your language. We are also hoping that we’ll be able to announce more languages available for spellchecking in the near future! How Does Windows Live Mail Know What Language to Use When Spellchecking? In many cases, Windows Live Mail will automatically detect what language you’re using and spellcheck in that language. So how do we do that? When you set up Windows, you told it what language you wanted to use, and we ask Windows to give us that same information. What does this mean for you? If you only use one language, it means that you don’t have to mess around with your spellchecking settings – Windows Live Mail just knows what language to use for spellchecking. However, if you often send mail in different languages you can use the Language Bar, a Windows tool that allows you to easily change languages in Windows. Whenever you do this, Windows Live Mail will pick up that change in a couple seconds and switch the language being used to spellcheck the email you’re composing. Here’s some information about the Language Bar and how you can use it to switch languages: Windows Vista Help for the Language Bar Windows XP Help for the Language Bar Also, if you’d like, you can turn off the language detection feature and explicitly set the language being used when spellchecking. To do this, open the options dialog in Windows Live Mail by clicking on “Options” here: In the Option dialog that pops up, select the “Spelling” tab. The option you want to turn off is “Check spelling in current input language” – uncheck that check box. Then you can select a new default language in the Languages list – simply select the language you want to spellcheck in, then hit the “Set Default” button to make it your spellchecking language. If the language wasn’t installed, you’ll need to click the “Install” button before you click the “Set Default” button – that’ll download the language you want from Microsoft’s servers. Please let us know what you think of spellchecking in Windows Live Mail! Stephen Sisk ![]() ![]() Tue, 04 Nov 2008 19:36:43
Microsoft has put a lot of emphasis in recent years on usability studies – throughout the development process for our products, we make sure to bring customers in to see how well they’re able to accomplish various tasks. We give them a computer and a list of common activities users need to do every day with Windows Live Mail – setup a new email account, read email, search for old emails, etc… We then see if the user can successfully accomplish the tasks without help and use that information to help point out ways to improve our product. Usability studies are just part of how we ensure that we’re building software that’s usable by both advanced and beginner users – we try and think about how to make products that are easy to use from the initial conception all the way to release. A good example of how this can change a product is email account setup. Back when we were first creating Windows Live Mail, it became obvious to our team that setting up email accounts can be a difficult task for people. In order to set up an email account you need to know a couple pieces of information that consumers normally don’t need to think about and that are hard to remember – to use a classic example, my mom doesn’t know what a POP or IMAP server is, nor should she have to. In usability studies where users have to set up new email accounts and they need to do detailed setup involving detailed server settings like this, many, many people failed to successfully set up the account without detailed and exact instructions of what to do. So, our team added a feature that we call Autodiscovery. What is Autodiscovery? Autodiscovery is a part of the email account setup process – when you start to add a new email account, we ask you only for your email address and password, and from that, we can often automatically setup your new email account without entering any more information. This is great, because everyone knows their email address and password (hopefully – if you’ve forgotten your password you have bigger problems :), so setting up an email account is simple – no changing your IMAP port or figuring out whether you need to enable SSL. If the user’s server isn’t in our list of known servers, we just let them go through the normal setup process they would have gone through before. It’s a real win for users because email account setup is easy and accomplished quickly. So how does this work? The Windows Live Mail team has compiled a list of commonly used email servers from ISPs around the world and the email settings to make them work. When you enter your email address, we compare the domain name in that address to the domain names in our list. If we find a match, we then use those server settings. From time to time, we update this list of email servers by looking at the major ISPs in countries around the world. Stephen Sisk Program Manager, Windows Live Mail Mon, 15 Dec 2008 19:28:09
Today we announced a Beta refresh of our Windows Live Essentials programs, including Windows Live Mail, Messenger, Photo Gallery, Movie Maker, Writer, Toolbar, and Family Safety.. You can download the latest versions here.  Over the last few months we have been receiving lots of great feedback and working hard to get ready to release the final versions. But, before we do that, we are refreshing the beta versions once more to make sure we’ve ironed out the final kinks.  Please download and install the latest beta, and let us know if you’re running into any issues that we need to take care of before we release the final versions.  Thanks, and as always…Enjoy! --Tanja ![]() ![]() Tue, 13 Jan 2009 17:11:04
 The Windows Live Calendar team is about to release more cool features to our web calendar service. In preparation for this upgrade, we expect 4-5 hours of downtime starting on Tuesday, January 13, at 11am Pacific time. This downtime will also affect your calendar in Windows Live Mail. We apologize for any inconvenience. You should see your calendar back up and running with the new functionality by Thursday, January 15.  Mon, 22 Dec 2008 23:30:02
Last spring, Seth Doane met a family who were faced with using a food bank to help make ends meet. Now, after months of living on a very tight budget, the family has a happy holidays ahead, Doane reports.Mon, 22 Dec 2008 20:30:02
For years studies have shown that most people can still be healthy, even when just slightly overweight. But a new study shows that even being 10 pounds over an ideal weight can drastically increase risk of heart failure, Bill Whitaker reports. |
||||