Microsoft now has a new email
platform at Outlook.com. It’s a nicer format than the original Windows Live
and has new features. It includes a calendar, contact imports, Microsoft Office and integrates Skydrive. For those
of you who haven’t heard of Skydrive: It’s Microsoft’s cloud storage. It can be
accessed on your PC or Mobile device. Outlook is now cleaner and more user
friendly. It no longer just manages your
emails. You can create documents, set your calendar, post to social networks,
merge and monitor all of your email accounts (from any PC) and share video’s,
music, documents and more; All from one website. This new Outlook is going to put a strain on new Google users. I could
not find a mobile app, but I’m sure it will be coming soon.
From
Outlook.com you can access your original email account, or start a new one.
Once logged in you have four options in the left hand corner. They are mail,
people, calendar and Skydrive. The mail (box) pulls up a newly refined hotmail
account. Your folders are on the left and your email options come up on the
top. In the right hand corner is your profile, settings and messenger. You can
send messages while you check your email. Not much different from the others, but (in account settings) you have the ability to send/receive emails
from other accounts. Meaning you can maintain multiple other email accounts on
this one website.
Next you
move to the people (box). If you merged your old Hotmail account, your contacts
should already be on the left. A unique addition is that you can import your
Facebook, Twitter, Google+ and LinkedIn contacts into your list. You can view contact information from all the social networking sites, contact
them and receive posts and updates. They are sent to your Outlook account. For
someone like me, I don’t want to go through 4 different sites to find a singular
contact email address. On the other hand, it compiles all of a contacts’
non-private information together. So it is unique in its usefulness but if you
don’t want your info being gathered I would suggest updating your privacy
settings.
Moving
along the Boxes we find the Calendar. If you have added your social networking
contacts, you may find their birthdays have already been uploaded to your
calendar. Along with holiday’s you will also find the weather forecast in your
area. You will see the day/week/month tab and can add new calendars according to your needs. Something new,
is that you can set agenda’s or add a to-do list. Useful tools to the organized
busybody. You will find that this is similar to the iCloud calendar. Other than
that, well…it’s a calendar, what else do you want from it?
Finally we
come to the Skydrive box. This is the heart of the update. Skydrive comes with
7Gigs of storage space and allows you to create and save anything from the
Office suite. 7 Gigs are more than any other free storage accounts. There is already a mobile
app, so you can view anywhere. Now the main appeal of outlook is that you can
edit/view your Office projects everywhere. It automatically gets saved to the
cloud and can be viewed over any of your devices. It includes
Powerpoint, Excel, Excel Survey, OneNote and Word. Create on your PC, present
on your mobile device, and it’s stored in SkyDrive.
Microsoft is updating everything
these days and sometimes they get it right. They have given us a better ability
to check all our email accounts, all of our social networking sites, connect
more fluently, create and present faster and simplify our day to day activities
in one format. Google provides this as well but Microsoft has more years of
familiarity with its programs on their side. I’m not saying that one is better
than the other but Microsoft has definitely stepped up its game this year. Let’s
give them a chance and see if they can uphold our expectations.
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