Are you sitting comfortably? Than I’ll begin. I have been tipped off that http://www.hotmailpreview.com will be going live this coming Tuesday and will be describing Hotmail as being:
focused on three simple things to help make the inbox more efficient, including providing tools to dramatically cut down on all the clutter in your inbox, not just the spam, helping you to save time doing the most common things in your inbox and making it easier to view, share, and edit Microsoft Office documents in the cloud.
I have also been shown the above image of a photo email within Hotmail which looks to be a new way of sharing photos from online albums, it certainly looks more interesting than most “photo” emails I have been sent. Some people might be concerned that sending pictures this way will be a problem for users on low bandwidth but Microsoft have thought of this and will be using Windows Live SkyDrive to provide the storage for the photos in an email. 10 GB worth or 200 photos can be sent in a single email using this feature which I think could become a very useful feature for some.
It is thought that when Microsoft announce and demo the new version of Hotmail they will categorise the key points of the update as “Enhanced security”, “Eliminate the clutter”, “Get more done”, “View, share and edit Office documents in the cloud” and “Help protect your account”.
You can expect Microsoft to demo the following new features in Hotmail when they announce and demo the updated email service:
- Hotmail highlights: Immediately see if you have new email from friends, social network updates, shipments, appointments and birthday reminders – all in a single glance the moment you log in.
- Sweep. With this virtual broom you can quickly ‘sweep’ all unwanted mail out of your inbox and into folders or the trash. You can tell Hotmail to perform sweeps automatically with the simple check of a box. And you can sweep mail from your Gmail and Yahoo! Mail accounts by adding them to your Hotmail inbox, where you can send and receive mail from other email services.
- One click filters. In just a single click you can filter your entire inbox to show you the mail you care about most, whether it’s all messages from your contacts or from social networks like Facebook and LinkedIn or mailing groups you belong to. You can also click once to find all messages that contain photos, documents, videos, shipping updates or messages you’ve flagged.
- Advanced search and automated search suggestions. Not only has Hotmail added an advanced search pane, but we’ve also made advanced search easy with inbox search auto-complete. From the moment you type a single letter into the search box, Hotmail automatically suggests a number of searches so that you can more quickly find the messages you’re looking for.
- Conversation view. Group your emails by conversation or don’t – it’s completely up to you. A single click turns conversation view on or off.
- Active views: A lot of messages prompt you to leave your inbox and hop to other websites to complete actions. Hotmail is saving you time by enabling you to complete those actions right within the messages themselves, whether it’s viewing photos from Hulu, YouTube, or Justin.tv, or photos on Flickr or SmugMug, tracking the shipping status of packages in real time, or interacting with services like LinkedIn – all from the convenience of your inbox.
I have also had a chance to look all a full list of features but there doesn’t appear to be anything new that we didn’t already know. I am looking forward to seeing Microsoft demo this version of Hotmail, its just a shame we will have to wait until “mid-summer” before this is rolled out to use lot, unless anyone is lucky enough to get early access to it.
No comments:
Post a Comment