Windows Live
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.
more I'm changing the way I do things this year, and will be writing about some of the efficiency-related hardware, software, and services changes I'm making. First up: Email. And while this may seem obvious on the surface, switching to Microsoft-oriented email services was never obvious to me. But it happened.
more Today, Microsoft took yet another step to advance its Windows Live SkyDrive consumer-oriented cloud service, offering up free mobile apps for both Windows Phone and Apple's iPhone. I've been using these apps for over a week, and the capabilities are impressive, especially on Windows Phone, which provides document editing capabilities in addition to viewing.
more My advice is to consolidate email accounts aggressively in the cloud when possible, however, since client consolidation--as you'll see--requires a lot of configuration, and you'll need to repeat these configuration changes each time you reinstall Windows or reset your mobile device.
more In addition to configuring your primary email account to collect email from other, secondary, accounts, you could alternatively configure your secondary accounts to forward mail, automatically, to your primary account. There are some disadvantages to this approach, but these can be overcome if you know what to look for.
more In this second article of my email consolidation series, I'll move beyond abstract ideas and towards a more mechanical how-to, and examine how you can use one email service to collect email from another email service.
more This week, coinciding with the release of Mac OS X "Lion", Microsoft has updated Windows Live Mesh for the latest OS X version. And if you're looking to sync two or more folders of content between both Windows PCs and Macs, well. Windows Live Mesh is just the ticket.
more In late 2005, Microsoft announced the formation of its Windows Live division, which would integrate online services and applications that were previously branded with MSN more closely with its core Windows products. This retrospective covers the first three generations, or "waves," of Windows Live products and services, covering roughly the period from 2006 through 2008.
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