Windows Live
In the wake of this week’s surprisingly similar releases of the SkyDrive and Google Drive applications for Windows, it’s now clearer that both companies have the same service, Dropbox, in their sights. This wasn’t obvious at first since Microsoft already had a service, Windows Live Mesh, which was in many ways superior to Dropbox.
more Microsoft today released a number of SkyDrive updates, including a major change to the online service itself, a preview version of the Windows application, and updates to the Windows Phone and iPhone apps. Together, these changes provide the best peek yet at how Microsoft is evolving SkyDrive to meet the needs of anywhere/anytime access to personal data.
more In the Windows 8 Consumer Preview, the App Preview version of the Photos app provides a basic but attractive interface for viewing photos found on the PC, or in online services such as SkyDrive, Facebook and Flickr.
more Windows 8's new Metro environment doesn't include a file explorer app, but it does include a SkyDrive file explorer app, just one of several hints in the new OS that Microsoft's cloud storage solution will take on a much more important role going forward.
more Thanks to reader feedback, here are some more tips for organizing your email with Microsoft's Hotmail service.
more A reader chimes in with a very useful tip for implementing a Gmail-like Archive button in Hotmail using that latter service's Instant Actions functionality. I like it so much I'm using it myself. Now you can too.
more Microsoft is in the process of consolidating all of its somewhat separate online accounts--Windows Live ID, Xbox LIVE, Zune and Zune Pass, and many more--into a single aggregate account it will call Microsoft Your Account. Kudos to my Windows Secrets co-author Rafael Rivera for uncovering this change.
more Microsoft this week provided new information about how it will integrate its SkyDrive cloud-storage service with Windows 8 (and previous Windows versions), dramatically improving the interoperability between the two. Put simply, SkyDrive should see a huge surge in usage in the next year or two: This already-useful service is about to become indispensable.
more Earlier this month, I wrote about my decision to migrate my consolidated personal email accounts from Gmail to Hotmail, which I use along side Exchange-based solutions at work and with Office 365. Since then, I've gotten a lot of interesting feedback from readers and, perhaps not coincidentally, have seen some interesting moves from both Google and Microsoft in the web email space. But the big news, perhaps, is that this transition has gone a lot more smoothly than I'd imagined.
more Windows Phone 7.5 includes a great new feature called Linked Inbox, which lets you consolidate two or more email accounts into a single, integrated view. Not coincidentally, if you're consolidating email accounts as I am, this feature can also be very useful when you want to send email from two or consolidated accounts. Here's how to set it up.
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