The Connected Home Blog

I am a huge fan of the new Windows Live services and software.I think that Live Mail is truly excellent and use it to manage 7 email accounts, including Hotmail and GMail. I also think that the Windows Live Writer is brilliant and provides a much easier interface for blogging than is possible when doing so through a standard webpage method provided by the various blog providers. There is nothing really wrong with these sites for blogging,but I find being able to write posts offline with a more familiar menu system and UI suits me better.

There seems to have always been one element of Microsoft’s suite that has been missing though, a Windows Live Calendar. It had been discussed and we knew it was coming but it took a lot longer than the other services.

This was the one element that actually excited me more than any of the others. Having played around with Vista’s Windows Calendar I was impressed by the ability to publish and share calendars. If only we had somewhere to publish them to, and a way to view them online away from the home computer and then perhaps build the offline functionality in to an email and communication client.

I really hoped that upon its launch Live Calendar would add Vista’s Windows Calendar functionality and more to the Windows Live Mail client and that this would be synced with an online calendar in Hotmail, all able to be published and shared and hosted effortlessly alongside Hotmail.

Unfortunately when Windows Live Calendar finally launched it fell short of this mark and did little more than replace MSN calendar in Hotmail. Yes the sharing of calendars is there, but it isn’t linked to a desktop client and as such fails to be useful to me.

I like most people only go to Hotmail to check emails when away from home, otherwise I use Live Mail. Why on earth would I break this habit and start to open up a webpage and go though Hotmail to view my calendar?

I worry that the good people at Microsoft may have missed a trick which could have helped them to take back some of the ground that Google has been making in this area. What is available now, whilst only in Beta doesn’t seem to fit in with the ethos of the Windows Live experience of online content and desktop clients. It really does seem to have been a rebranding exercise.

I hope as the service moves from Beta to the main steam we see some of these features emerge. For now I will try out Vista’s build in calendar again, and maybe try to host it myself on my Home Server. I won’t then have access away from home through a web UI but it is a start.

Matt S

Filed under: Windows Home Server, Windows Live, Windows Live Calendar