Planning events can sometimes be a bit daunting.  Sending the invitations, keeping track of who's coming, figuring out what people might want to bring or what they might want to do -- it's all a lot of work!  A lot of people I know have been using Evite.com as their event planning solution.  What a lot of those same people don't know is that there is a great event planning solution built right into Windows Live called (appropriately) Windows Live Events. 

I decided it was time to start spreading the word about this great product.  For some help, I asked Charlotte Jones, a Senior Product Manager on the Windows Live team to do a podcast with me where we explore everything Events has to offer. 

You can download this specific podcast in the format you prefer using the links below:

• Windows Live Events (WMA format)
• Windows Live Events (MP3 format)

Or subscribe to my whole podcast series using these links:

• Windows Live Podcast Series (WMA format)
• Windows Live Podcast Series (MP3 format)

We hope you like what you hear and give Events a try the next time you find yourself in the middle of organizing your next gathering.

- Marcus

P.S.  And if you want to read about the ultimate use of Windows Live Events, check out this post from Jamie, one of our Windows Live community members.

Digital pictures revolutionized the way people share photos, and digital video is poised to do the same thing to what we all used to call "home movies".  Now, with some relatively inexpensive equipment, some of the right software, and an internet connection you can produce and share your digital memories easier than ever before.

This post isn't going to get into the details of what video gear (cameras, lighting, microphones, etc.) you'll need.  There are plenty of other resources you can check out for that information.  I'm also not going to get into all the video editing software and techniques you could use.  I'll probably save that for a future post after doing some more of my own experimenting.  Instead, I just want to focus on the basics of sharing your videos once you've got them captured and stored on your PC.

So what better way to explain video sharing than with a video?  I know that's a bit recursive, but I hope you'll find it enlightening.

Video Sharing 101 Video Clip:

As you'll see in the video, I took the path of least resistance and used MSN Soapbox because it's built right into the publish menu of Windows Live Photo Gallery.  But you could use your favorite video sharing service (YouTube anyone?), grab the URL or embed code, and accomplish the same results. 

For some other good resources on video posting, check out these blog entries from some of my fellow Windows Live community members:

• Adding Video Codes Manually
• Getting your home videos to Spaces the easy way

Good luck and best wishes as you share your digital memories!

- Marcus

I'm on Facebook, and it seems a ton of people I know are too.  Not just my current friends, but folks I knew reaching way back into my college days.  It's definitely a cool way to find and connect with both new and old friends.

One of the things I recently found on Facebook is the whole "Become a Fan" thing.  You can become a fan of products, TV shows, politicians, websites, and the list goes on and on.  Being a Windows Live guy, I searched for Windows Live products to see what was there.  Did you know there is a Windows Live Messenger page with 425,336 fans?  That is, at least at the time I wrote this post.  That's almost as many fans as Facebook itself has!  Wow!  I also found a Windows Vista page with 9,900 fans. 

What are your thoughts on Facebook?  I know a lot of people start out on it and get a bit of Facebook fatigue after a while.  I kind of count myself in that camp, but I'm starting to look at it again, especially with their recent redesign.

- Marcus

Earlier this year, I had the chance to watch Microsoft employees from around the world compete in a demo competition intended to showcase Windows and Windows Live.  Two guys from the Charlotte, North Carolina office here in the United States were finalists for the US competition.  They presented a very cool yet heartwarming demo based on their real world use of Windows Live to help stay in touch with a child in Brazil that one of them is sponsoring.

The two employees are Karan Parkash and Eric Kamont.  Karan posted more details about the work they did, along with a video of their demo up here.  In this podcast, I talked with both of them via telephone to get more details on GIVE Live and how anyone can use their approach to keep in touch with someone else across the globe.

You can download this specific podcast in the format you prefer using the links below:

• GIVE Live (WMA format)
• GIVE Live (MP3 format)

Or subscribe to my whole podcast series using these links:

• Windows Live Podcast Series (WMA format)
• Windows Live Podcast Series (MP3 format)

- Marcus

Are you watching the Olympics?  Do you wish that was you out there swimming, cycling, running, or diving?  As part of Microsoft's overall celebration of this year's Olympic Games, the Windows Live team in the US has created this fun site called Reveal Your Inner Athlete.  You run through a quick quiz, and then the site tells you what your inner athlete is.  You can even upload your own picture of your very own head, and then share your inner athlete with your friends.  Mine turned out to be a tennis player:

Why not give it a try?

And after you're done, check out Quikboy's post about some of the other stuff Microsoft is doing, plus John Kavanagh's post about Olympics add-on to Windows Media Center.

Enjoy the games,

Marcus

Vacation season is upon us! I hope everyone is going to take a little time off to spend with your friends and family

As you snap all those digital photos, I thought it would be a great time for me to sit down with JP Wollersheim, a Senior Product Manager here at Microsoft who works on Windows Live Photo Gallery, and learn a bit more about that product.  Hopefully you'll find some inspiration here to try Photo Gallery as a solution for downloading, organizing, and sharing all those great vacation pictures!

You can download these specific podcasts using the links below:

• Photo Gallery (WMA format)
• Photo Gallery (MP3 format)

Or subscribe to my whole podcast series using these links:

• Windows Live Podcast Series (WMA format)
• Windows Live Podcast Series (MP3 format)

- Marcus

The Windows Live team in the UK has done it again!  They are always rolling out creative stuff, with the latest being www.minimise-me.com.  Check it out and you can create your own "mini me" (apologies to Austin Powers fans) that will appear as your display picture in Windows Live Messenger.  Mine is shown at the left.

They have also created various celebrity characters as well, albeit some with a decidedly UK flair.  Matt has blogged about some of the top celeb downloads. 

Give it a go and create that miniature version of yourself you've always wanted!

- Marcus

One of the best things (IMHO) we've done with Windows Live recently has been the i'm Initiative.  With the help of everyone who uses Windows Live Messenger and Windows Live Hotmail, we share a portion of our advertising revenue with the cause of choice of the person using our products.

Recently, I had a chance to talk with Tina He, a product management intern at Microsoft who is working on the initiative.  Tina and I chatted about i'm, what customers are saying about it, what benefits have resulted from it, and what we have planned for the future.  It was great to have Tina as an intern here this summer and hopefully we might see her back here in the future after she's done at Wharton.

You can download just these podcasts using the links below:

• i'm Initiative (WMA format)
• i'm Initiative (MP3 format)

Or subscribe to my whole podcast series using these links:

• Windows Live Podcast Series (WMA format)
• Windows Live Podcast Series (MP3 format)

(And yes, I realize the irony of this graphic, since this podcast about the i'm Initiative really is all talk.  But I couldn't resist.)

- Marcus

Earlier this week, I decided to start a podcast series around Windows Live.  For those of you who aren't familiar with podcasting, there are plenty of resources on the web that can tell you all about it, ranging from how to best record your audio (or video), edit it, host it, and syndicate it using RSS.  One of the best explanations comes from Common Craft who do these awesome videos:

Common Craft Video Explaining Podcasting:

It all looks so easy.  Or so I thought.

I thought it would be a simple matter of uploading my audio files to SkyDrive, linking to them in a Spaces blog post, and the resulting Spaces RSS feed would "automagically" transform these linked files into enclosed files.  It didn't quite work out that way.  It turns out that neither the RSS feeds from Spaces or from SkyDrive do this automagical thing I wanted.

So here's how I got it to work anyway, with a little help from some extra stuff and a little manual effort.  This is a bit of a long post, so you might want to grab a cup of coffee.

Part 1:  Store Your Audio Files on SkyDrive

This is the easy part.  Record your audio files and then put them up on a public folder in SkyDrive.  I've decided to create a folder for all my podcasts, and the put each podcast (in both WMA and MP3 formats) in separate folders:

Part 2:  Create your RSS feed(s)

I decided to create two feeds, one for people that want WMA formatted audio and one for people that want MP3 instead.  You can "hand craft" your RSS feed using a text editor like Notepad to build the XML file, but I found a great little app called FeedForAll that helps you build the files.  It's free to try and a nominal fee to register (which I've paid gladly!).  I won't describe all the features of the product and how to use them here.  It's fairly easy to figure out.

However, I do want to give you a couple important tips when using FeedForAll.

Make sure you provide a good link to your blog entries about your podcasts in the main Feeds tab and the Items tab (Feeds tab shown below):

This is the link people could click on to read more about your podcast versus listening to it.  I actually decided to link to my RSS feed of all my podcast blog entries.

Second, when you start creating the items in the feed, paste in the URL for the actual audio file (not just the icon file display in SkyDrive).  Get the playable URL by right clicking on the file in SkyDrive and copying the shortcut.

To better explain, click on these two URLs to see what happens:

• You DON'T Want This
• You DO Want This

Make sure you strip off the "?download" part of the second URL before you paste it into FeedForAll.  An example entry is shown below:

Now, get the exact length of the file to enter in the FeedForAll window shown above, call up the properties of that file from wherever you have it stored on your main hard drive (before you uploaded it to SkyDrive).  An example properties window is shown at right.  Notice how the file size above and the file size to the right are the same 8887026 bytes.

Repeat this same process for all the items (audio files) you want to include in your podcast feed.

Part 3:  Storing Your RSS Feed XML Files On-Line

After you create your RSS feeds, you need to store them on-line.  These are the little XML gems that are going to be the key for your subscribers.  You have a couple options here.

You could put them to your public folder on SkyDrive.  This is okay if you have a set of items in your feed and you're not going to be adding any new items to that feed.

If you are planning to add new items to the feed over time, I found out SkyDrive isn't a workable option.  The reason is the next time you upload the new XML file to SkyDrive, it creates a new file identifier that will be inside the actual URL link which basically creates a new feed and would require a new subscription.  Your old feed becomes an orphan.

So if you do plan to continue to add files over time (and most podcasters do), you'll need to find a new place to put your files.  Fortunately, Microsoft has another option you can try.  You can use Microsoft Office Live Small Business to create a quick website and upload files to that website.  Here is the way that looks inside the administration tools of Microsoft Office Live Small Business:

If you have another on-line storage option, you can use that instead.  Just make sure the XML file is displayed as a feed when you click on it, and not some file icon representation.

Part 4:  Doing the Blog Post in Spaces

OK, you're almost there.  The final step is doing a blog post in Spaces, and including the links to these new XML files you just posted. 

If you use SkyDrive, make sure the URLs to post should be the actual links and not just the links to the icon display of the file in SkyDrive.  This is exactly the same as what you did to get the right URLs for the audio files themselves.  For example:

• You DON'T Want This
• You DO Want This

If you have your XML file stored some where else (like my Office Live Small Business example above), just make sure (again) that the URL shows the actual feed and not just an icon link to the file.

Now anyone can click on that feed, subscribe to it, and they'll have your podcast files included as enclosures.  When you add new audio files, just add them as new items to your RSS feeds and repost those XML files back up on your on-line storage location.  Remember, if you use SkyDrive and repost your XML files, you're creating a brand new feed which will be problematic for all the reasons discussed above.

It's not automagical, but it's not very hard either!

Good luck building your own podcasts,

- Marcus

P.S.  I'm talking with the SkyDrive and Spaces teams about how we can make their RSS feeds include enclosures, so maybe this will become automagical in the future.

I've started taking my portable digital recorder around Microsoft  and doing quick interviews with some of my fellow employees that work in and around Windows Live.  For this first podcast of what I hope will be a long-term series, I connected with Ryan Gavin, Senior Director of Product Management for Windows Live.

Ryan and I chatted about the question we all get asked most -- "What is Windows Live?"  People are always looking for a good general overview of Windows Live, especially when it covers so much territory, ranging from photos to e-mail to blogging. 

Check out the podcast and please let me know what you think.

• Windows Media Audio Format
• MP3 Format

More to come in the future about Photo Gallery, the i'm Initiative, and other cool stuff.  I'm also going to start doing some Podcasts with some of the folks in our Windows Live community too.

July 23 Update: Making Real Podcast RSS Feeds 

Jamie correctly pointed out that I need a real podcast RSS feed that includes enclosures to truly call this a podcast.  The links above take you to the files, and you can play them on your PC or download them manually to your iPod or Zune.  But most portable media aficionados want those file delivered as part of an RSS feed.

After a little exploring, some trial-and-error, and some help in testing from Jamie, I'm pleased to include links to the RSS feeds for the podcasts in both WMA and MP3 format:

• WMA RSS Feed
• MP3 RSS Feed

Look for a new blog post from me soon with all the details on how you can turn Spaces and SkyDrive into your own personal podcasting platform!

July 24 Update: Bad News, Good News about Storing the XML Files

OK, one more wrinkle came up to be sorted out.  I found that if you update the RSS feeds stored on SkyDrive with new XML files, the file ID portion of the URL changes which basically creates a new feed and orphans the last one.  That's the bad news.  The good news is that I found a different place to store these XML files.  More on that later today when I blog about this whole adventure in detail.

But for now, please use the new links below as the RSS feeds for my podcast series:

• WMA RSS Feed
• MP3 RSS Feed

- Marcus

With summer here, most of us are on the go more than ever.  We're starting to see some fairly cool ways to use MSN, Windows Live, and Live Search on your mobile phone when you're out and about.  I'll be the first to admit it would be nice to resolve the issue of all these different brand names, but looking past that, the stuff you can do on your mobile phone now is quite amazing.

To get started and find out more about everything you can do, just go to http://mobile.msn.com on your PC.  About midway down the left side of the page, you'll see a set of icons you can flip through that shows you everything you can do:

When you're ready to give it a try, just key in your mobile phone number in the space provided on the upper right corner (shown here) and you'll get a link sent to your phone.

If you have a mobile phone that runs Windows Mobile software, or if you have one of a select group of Nokia phones, you can also download additional software that gives you even more capability.  You can learn more and send a link to your phone to get the software by clicking here. 

As you probably have heard, today is Bill Gates's (or BillG is he's known internally) last full-time day at Microsoft.  I only ever met him once at a small meeting years ago when we were discussing some of the early XML and BizTalk work.  When I started working with computers as a kid in the early 80's I barely new anything about Microsoft, but used their product (the BASIC programming language on my Commodore computers) every day.  So in a way, I have Bill to thank for getting me hooked on computers in those early years.

After I started working for a software company in the early 90's, Microsoft was definitely a force in the industry.  I still remember being a beta tester for Chicago (the codename for Windows 95), and how excited the whole industry was when that launched.  I was even more excited when I got the chance to come work for Microsoft in 1997 and have enjoyed all the time I've spent here in the company Bill started way back in 1975.

So thank you, Bill, and best wishes as you go on to do great things at the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation.

You can see more about BillG's past, present, and future here:

Bill Gates: Looking Back, Moving Ahead

At work, I practically live in Microsoft Outlook.  I'm always using it to deal with e-mail, schedule meetings, check my calendar, find a contact's phone number, and manage my "to-do" list.  If you're like me, however, you also want to sneak in a little time now and then to check your personal e-mail.  You could always do that with firing up a web browser and going out to your mail service's website, but I've found what I think is a better way if you use Hotmail.

Outlook Connector is a great free add-in to Microsoft Outlook that let's you more easily and effectively manage your personal e-mail, contacts and calendar from right inside Outlook.  Here is how it looks after you get it installed:

So now I can just continue to live in Outlook while at work, but with quick click check in on what's going on with my home e-mail account, look up a personal contact, or even check my home calendar.  As the lines blur between work and home, it's a great way to keep balance in your life.

One of the things I really like about working at Microsoft is you can always find a lot of passionate people that are excited to share that passion with others.  One great example of how all this energy is "channeled" (no pun intended) is Channel 10 -- an on-line place for technology enthusiasts.

Some of the stuff they post is a little too "out there" for typical consumers like you and me, but the vast majority of what they post I find very interesting and educational.  The latest example is a new series about digital photography that they've started called ShutterSpeed.  They have done two episodes so far and both are great.  I plan to blog about them as they come on-line to make sure everyone in the Windows Live community knows about what they're doing.  Many of these episodes feature bits and pieces of Windows Live, especially Windows Live Photo Gallery.

Episode 1: online video storage, photo editing tools, principles of photography, what to look for in a digital camera

• Episode 2:  Photosynth, top photo locations, pro photo tools, geotagging, meta data, Windows Live Photo Gallery demo

Lately I've been browsing around YouTube quite a bit.  If you search on "Windows Live" on YouTube, you'll get over 5,000 results.  Wow!  I'm planning to continue to check out all the stuff up there and see what we can do to include the best videos as part of our broader Windows Live consumer community.

Some of the videos I've found up there are created by Microsoft for various events, programs, and initiatives.  One of these is the Microsoft Live@EDU program designed to offer Microsoft Windows Live and Office Live products and services out to students.  They've created great short video clips that talk about and show different parts of our products.  So when I was thinking about what to post to describe Windows Live Events, I decided to let their video do the talking for me, featuring Karen Luk, a program manager on the Windows Live team.

Karen's Video about Windows Live Events:

Pretty cool, huh?  You can see more of their videos at http://www.youtube.com/user/MicrosoftLiveAtEdu.  And you can learn more about Windows Live Events at http://www.windowslive.com/events/overview.html. 

- Marcus

Different people have different ways they stay connected.  Going back into history, staying connected meant talking face-to-face. Then it became writing letters and cards.  Next, radio and the telephone were the "connection utilities" of choice.  Now it's instant messaging, texting on mobile phones, posting on social networking sites, blogging and twittering. 

I've yet to get bit by the twittering bug, but I confess I'm staying connected in pretty much every other way that's possible.  I've even been known to send my parents handwritten cards every so often.  But I find my main connection "hub" is Windows Live Messenger.  You can see a screen grab of my main Messenger window from a few days ago shown on the right. 

One of the reasons I say it's my "hub" is it gives me so much information about people I'm connected to right in one spot.  I can see personal status messages next to people where they're telling me what they are doing, how they are feeling, or even what music they are listening to at the time.  I can see who's on-line on their PC and who's on their mobile device.  I can even see gleams (those little 's) next to some people that tells me they have recently updated something in their profile or on their Windows Live Space.  Clicking on the ID with the gleam next to it gives me a bit more information about what's new with that person:

Finally, Messenger becomes a jumping off point for me to go into Spaces, launch Mail, or (of course) start a conversation with someone including voice and video if I want.  It's definitely critical to the way I stay connected.

Earlier this year, my wife and I took a great vacation to South Africa.  I put together this brief video that shows how we used Windows Live to share our memories from that trip with our friends and family.

South Africa Vacation Story:

The next time you're planning to get away from it all and completely unplug, why not let people know using automated vacation replies?  Just start by selecting "More options..." from the options menu in the upper right corner of the Hotmail page, as shown in the illustration at left.

Next, click on Send automated vacation replies under the Manage your account section:

Then type in your automated reply text.  Don't forget to make sure the checkbox at the bottom of the screen is checked "on" so the automated replies only go to your contacts!

If you have a lot of different photo albums associated with your Windows Live Spaces account (like I do) here's a tip for just highlighting the most recent or special album(s) on your Spaces home page.  In fact, you can do this several times and create different album groups on your home page to show different things (vacations, kids, pets, etc.).

First, click on the Customize button, and select Add Modules, as shown at left.

Next scroll the Modules tab down to the Photos, music, and video section and click on Add next to Photos as shown below.

You'll now have a new photos module added to your main Spaces page.  You need to click Save to keep this new change. 

Now, click on Edit module (shown at left) which will bring up a page (shown below) where you can change the name of this photo group, select just the albums you want to show (even in the order in which you want to show them), and change other display options as well.

When you go back to your main Spaces page, you'll see that new album group with your new title and only the photos you've chosen to display.

Have you ever wanted to record something you were doing on your PC so you could show it to your friends and family?  Maybe it's some cool new way to get something done.  Or maybe it's a set of steps to help someone learn something new.  There have been a variety of different products on the market to do this, both free and at a cost, but I've always found the free ones to be limited and not wanted to pay for the others. 

Now our friends over in Office Labs have recently released a new, free application called Community Clips that can help you record anything on your screen.  It's really easy to install and use, and includes built-in publishing of your videos to MSN Soapbox.  I created this very brief 24 second clip to show you the site and clicking on the install button:

Sample Community Clips Video: 

OK, I admit that's not much of a video, but it was just a test to see how this worked.  It was amazingly simple process and you can try it too, just follow the steps below.

Start by going to the Community Clips site and click the big green button to download the application as shown in the video above.

After the product is installed, get ready to record.  You can record just a single application, a region of the screen, or everything running on your PC.  Just click the small icon in your system try to start recording what you want (or press Windows+Alt+R).  In the illustration below I'm starting to record an instance of Internet Explorer (one of the several things running on my PC):

When you're finished recording, just click the same small icon in the tray and click "Stop Recording" (or press Windows+Alt+T). 

Next, a Window similar to the one shown below will pop up and you can then use the Save button to save your video clip on your PC and then click the Upload button to send your file to MSN Soapbox:

Finally, using Windows Live Writer, you can add that video to any blog post using the Insert Video... command, followed by selecting the new video from MSN Soapbox list for your Windows Live ID.

See how easy it is?  Why not give it a try and show off some of your favorite things you've discovered in Windows Live?  We can't wait to see what you post!