Windows Live Mail, Hotmail, Office Live and Custom Domains

akhus — Sat, 21 Jul 2007 21:00:00 GMT

Ok i know how confusing the branding was, and ya Windows Live Mail is not hotmail :) it is a desktop application to access any kind of email either POP3, IMAP or HTTP like hotmail etc... So why use it, and what is office live and custom domains where do they all fit into the picture.

Let me then tell ya the scenarios around Windows Live Mail and how I was so happy to use the 3 services in conjunction together. So i have 4 or 5 other email accounts with a mix of pop3 and http and of course i never check them that often so i wanted an application beside outlook 2007 that is much more lightweight to check all those emails in one place. Here Windows Live Mail comes into the picture ;) basically it is the next version of outlook express, it has RSS integration which is awesome, news groups using NNTP and most of all it can support any number of accounts in one client. Further it is so light weight takes around mili seconds to start up, outlook 2007 takes almost 5 minutes on 2 gig machine :) Finally, it integrates so well with messenger, office live and custom domains.

So lets speak a little bit about what you can do with Custom Domains. Well lets say you create your own domain and you want a secure email service along with it, something that can provide you with a 2 gig storage and a superb anti-spam filter, outlook like interface then you should go for custom domains with hotmail :). So you configure custom domains and you point your DNS MX Record to hotmail and voilà you got an email account with your domain but using hotmail service. I am using it now and it is amazing, now i can access my custom domain email just from any where and all spam and phishing is handled by hotmail

By the way i also use gmail and i am comparing the spam filters and i get the same spam content in both but hotmail completely blocks it while gmail is still showing it in my inbox.

Anyway now what about Office Live. So lets say you have your own company and you have 5 - 25 employees or more but it is a small business and you want a website, business applications, calendar, contacts and most important you want EMAIL. so you sign up with office live YES free of charge and you get 25 accounts 2 GB storage for each email with hotmail services :)

Now get your office live account, custom domain account, hotmail and use them with Windows Live Mail you get a full desktop email application with all hotmail services but in an offline capable application. Isn't that amazing :)

And if you wonder if you can receive and "send" yes it works i tried it yesterday and it is amazing now i can access all my emails in one place and use my hotmail and custom domain account to send and receive through Windows Live Mail. Even better i have Windows Live Mail in 3 different desktops and i don't have to worry about storage cause hotmail is an online service handling all the storage for me :) and what everything is online for me :)

Now a bunch of things i would love ot see in the future of Windows Live Mail, is integration with windows live photo gallery, and windows live folders. It would be my all in one application just from there i can access my photos and folders that are all in sync with a reliable online service.

Google Gears and MS Silverlight could this be the death of the Desktop?

akhus — Sun, 24 Jun 2007 10:12:00 GMT

Ok if you have been following up with the latest dev tools and gadgets then you must've heard of Google Gears and Microsoft Silverlight. Silverlight is not just an adobe flash (formerly Macromedia) competitor, it is a whole new client platform for building interactive media applications over the web. Basically the idea is based on .NET 3.0 XAML and WPF and allowing developers to build more media interactive and rich UI applications over the web. Anyone who wrote flash scripts know it is never a Dev job, we all hate scripts mostly :).

We always want a compiled langauge inside Visual Studio and to provide us more access to APIs, components etc.. So thats silverlight a whole new platform for both developers and designers over .NET 3.0 and also using both script languages like JavaScript and .NET language C#. From what i see it has been picked up so quickly among developers, and i see over the net there are great hopes for this to be one of the most adopted platforms for web UI.

However, what about google gears and how it fits in the whole picture, and what about the future of the desktop and where is it going. So google gears has been released almost 3 - 4 weeks ago to Devs, and it introduces a whole new concept of offering offline accessability to web applications and also data store. Well Silverlight offers isolated data store, not of course relational data base like gears but it is a store that can be used for anything and still it is under development so who knows what they will come up with. But gears offer a complete offline availabilty of those applications, and this pauses a great question "What is the future of the desktop environment". Well from my opinion i see google will be heading more over a UI framework that will be similar to gears and probably an add on, and they will invest more and more into a semi connected client that can be accessed from the browser, and after 3 - 5 years maybe less they will have their own Office application running on that browser without the need to be fully connected and providing the same richness of the interface.

Basically, i think today with silver light and gears you can prove this concept, there was a blog article written about a sample integrating both Gears and Silverlight together so it is not far from reality.

So could this be the replacement of desktop applications in both the home and the enterprise? Could this be the new Smart Client? Will google be developing an MS office rival? well i don't know but i see high hopes for both Silverlight and Gears to change the way we think about the whole software development ecosystem.

Akram Hussein - Life & Technical Discussions : Web 2.0

Windows Live Mail, Hotmail, Office Live and Custom Domains

Google Gears and MS Silverlight could this be the death of the Desktop?