How powerful is your Windows Live Account? Part 4

Here is the wrap up for my windows live series and I’m going to group all the rest of my favorite features in this post. We’ll start with Windows Live Groups. Basically, it’s like SharePoint for consumers, offering a way for any group of individuals to share things like documents and other files, calendars, and photos, and a place to connect, discuss things, and discover what’s going on. When you create a group, a group calendar is created for you in Windows Live Calendar, and you can overlay your group calendars in your own private calendar if you’d like. Groups also get their own dedicated storage in SkyDrive that is separate from your individual storage, and you can privately share photos among members of a group very easily. Unique to Groups is the ability to start and participate in discussions, which are essentially Web-based newsgroups, but private, of course, to the group. This is a grate way to collaborate on projects or to set up your own private news group.

 Next let’s talk about Windows Live People a service that serves as a central address book for all of your contacts, including those from Hotmail, Windows Live Messenger, and elsewhere in the Windows Live network. Windows Live People has a few interesting features. Duplicate contacts resolution You can invite contacts from third party services, like Facebook, My Space and others to join your Windows Live network. Windows Live People includes new functionality around permissions so that you can determine which groups get access to which information you’re publishing online. Put simply, Windows Live People is like the ultimate cloud-based contacts management system. Very handy in managing all those friends you made online.

Now lets talk photo sharing you can access your online photo albums from just about anywhere in Windows Live. You can share photos and photo albums with friends via Windows Live Messenger, for example, and email them from Windows Live Mail. On the services end, your photos are available from Hotmail (for emailing), accessible from Windows Live Profile, can be posted to blogs and Web sites with Windows Live Spaces, and can be shared via Windows Live Events.

Some of the functionality in Windows Live Photos is obvious browsing to the Windows Live Photos Web site, you can view photo album thumbnails and see animated slideshows. You can push albums to digital photo frames via Windows Live FrameIt. The storage back-end? It’s all handled by Windows Live SkyDrive. And yes, you can browse your photos there as well. Looking at the Windows Live Photos site specifically, you’ll see mostly basic functionality. You can create and view photo albums, which don’t support sub-folders of any kind, which will be problematic for people with large photo collections. You can view photos inside an album by thumbnail or via List or Details view.You can also play slideshows, which are attractive enough, but don’t offer much in the way of options You can add a caption, tag people in the photo, or add a comment. Others who have permission to do so can also add comments.  As far as protecting photos go, Windows Live Photos offers various sharing options on a per-album basis. You choose to make albums public (available to one and all), or set permissions to your network (view or add, edit, delete) or your extended network. You can also filter permissions based on the groups you’ve set up in Windows Live People, Windows Live Messenger, and in other places, so you might set up an album to be viewable only by family members or whatever. You can also enter specific email addresses if you’d like.

My final thoughts of Windows Live are the sheer scope of what Microsoft is trying to accomplish with Windows Live is amazing. There’s a lot going on here, and it’s not all happening at once. The sum of Windows Live is greater than its individual parts thanks to the deep integration Microsoft has fashioned between these services, their Windows Live Essentials application counterparts, and the dozens of third party services that will be coming together over the next several weeks and beyond. Microsoft’s vision of creating a hub for your digital life is a good one, and its implementation is impressive. I think this release is really going to change people’s minds about Windows Live and what a powerful tool it can be. I have not listed all the possibilities in Windows Live, but I hope I have piqued your intrest enough to give it a closer look.