Microsoft Introduces Windows Live Essentials Beta

Microsoft began rolling out the new beta for Windows Live Essentials yesterday, offering up a variety of services for photo-sharing, blogging, email and document productivity.

The beta includes programmes such as Messenger, Photo Gallery, Movie Maker, Sync, Writer, Mail and Family Safety. Besides offering a way to share photos and video among one’s contacts, the suite also includes tools for organising email accounts, synchronising files across multiple PCs, and accessing those files from the cloud.

Among the offerings, Windows Live Photo Gallery lets users manage their images. New facial recognition technology allows the programme to automatically tag people in those photos, or at least make an attempt. Geo-tagging, where GPS coordinates are baked into an image, is also supported by Photo Gallery. And Movie Maker offers granular options for saving videos (including more mobile-device-friendly formats), customizing settings, and supports recording from a webcam.

The Windows Live Mail email client supports multiple email accounts and brings calendar and RSS feeds onto the platform. The various email accounts can be colour-coded, for easier management. “Windows Live Mail has the Photo Mail feature where I can create personalised albums within an email which stores photos privately in SkyDrive,” Brandon LeBlanc, a spokesperson for Microsoft, wrote in a posting yesterday on The Windows Blog, “so whomever I send email to can view the photos but without taking up space in their email account or taking a long time to download.”

The new version of Windows Live Messenger bundles a variety of social-networking services into the user’s message stream, in keeping with recent web-communication trends that seek to coalesce outside applications into existing services; users can update their Facebook or Windows Live status through Messenger, as well as comment on their friends’ recent Facebook postings.

Sync and Mail likely to attract enterprises

For more business-centric users, though, the most useful tool in this particular collection may be Windows Live Sync, which allows users to synchronise documents and other files on multiple PCs. With Sync, users can also enable remote access to any of their PCs.

“I currently have 5 PCs connected and syncing together with Sync,” LeBlanc wrote in his blog posting. “I have 2 folders I am syncing – one for work documents and another for personal stuff. I keep them separate. I am able to choose to have each of these folders sync with ‘SkyDrice synced storage,’ which is 2GB of free online cloud storage for my files. Everyone gets this today with Sync.”

Despite its legacy as a desktop company, Microsoft has increasingly focused on cloud-based functionality. In a 4 March speech at the University of Washington, Microsoft chief executive, Steve Ballmer suggested that cloud services represented “the bet for our company”.

“Companies like ours, can they move and dial in and focus and embrace?” Ballmer asked an audience comprised primarily of students. “That’s where we’re programmed. You shouldn’t get into this industry if you don’t want things to change. The field of endeavour keeps moving forward.”

Microsoft’s recent cloud-based initiatives include Windows Azure, SQL Azure, web-based Office applications, and Xbox Live. Despite the cloud focus, however, the company’s fortunes are still largely tied to the performance of its desktop-based software, and probably for good reason; Microsoft’s other bit of news on yesterday was that Windows 7, the latest version of its operating system, has sold 150 million copies since its October 2009 release.