Wow, May was a really hectic month! We shipped our second minor release since our launch and this time around, OLW beta went international by launching it in Spanish, French, German and Japanese.  We also listened really hard to our customers on the forums, Support, anecdotal feeback and family and friends, used the workspace internally to do our work and you bet we learned a lot! We heard something loud and clear - we needed to cater to our international customers quickly and our current Office integration experience had a few hiccups that needed to get ironed out.  This was an interesting release for me coz I wore two hats for this release - the PM for the Office Live Add-in and Office integration and also, the PM release driver to ensure that the entire team worked together with a clear vision, with quality and on time. 

The Office integration from OLW had some unique challenges:

1) The product we integrate with has shipped:  Shipping client bits is a different ballgame than the service. Office 2003, XP and 2007 have shipped already so we have to work with whatever is available and use the constraints to our advantage. Since we do not have the luxury of changing Office (and we don't want to), we had to figure out how we would provide our functionality in a way that worked for you, our customer. That includes being very, very creative about what is available (e.g. adding Web Views in the File Dialog). In the few instances where we really wanted to change Office behavior, we were careful about requesting hotfixes that we now ship as part of the Office Live Update 1.1 (that includes the Office Live Add-in). We didnt want users having to get the Add-in and then be redirected elsewhere to get the fixes.

2) Customer configurations: Now add the various OS  that we wanted to support - Vista and XP and the service packs that have shipped for both the OS and the Office versions and the test matrix just blows my mind. We run lots and lots of tests to ensure that a change we make in one configuration

3) Live ID as Authentication:  On the client, Live ID auth is a different ballgame than domain auth. Since we use Live ID to authenticate the user,  we wanted to make sure that the client and server were able to "talk" in a way where the user didn't care about which he was using and could access their documents easily. This was far tougher than we thought and it took us nearly 5 teams working across the company to get a solution that covered all the scenarios. Add to this the complication of the OS and Office versions and that these scenarios didnt even exist when they shipped and I can tell you, we all learned a lot about the network stacks and how they are used. 

I am extremely proud to say that we have now released the Office Live Update 1.1, with a version of the Add-in that resolves a lot of the issues above and is a step in the direction of better client integration. We already have a bunch of feature improvements for future versions but would love to hear from you too!

Enjoy! More on what it means to drive a release within OLW later this month,

Kavitha