Since the new Outlook.com launched in July, the positive feedback has been overwhelming. Outlook.com has received a number of other accolades around the world and there are already over 25 million active users. Learn why Gmail users are switching to Outlook.com and read about new features launching today for customizing your inbox, one-click archiving, keyboard shortcuts, and more.

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On my last vacation I went back home to visit family. As anyone who works in technology can appreciate, I quickly became the designated tech support person. So I spent part of my vacation patching, installing software and fixing computers, while learning how each of my family’s computer setups differ. My mom runs Vista with IE 7, my brothers both use Macs and Safari (and wisely didn’t let me touch them), my dad runs Windows XP, and my in-laws run Vista with Firefox. This experience made...

Microsoft has just released a new Beta version of the Outlook Connector – an add-in that puts your Windows Live Hotmail data in Outlook. Previous versions of the Connector synchronized e-mail and contacts for free, but required a subscription to premium services to synchronize your Hotmail calendar. With the new 12.1 Beta, calendar synchronization is free and what’s more, it synchronizes to the new Windows Live Calendar Beta service! You can now take advantage of Outlook’s great...

Greg Lindhorst (Program Manager on the team) is looking for customer feedback on the impact of some new features on cross version scenarios. Love to get some feedback from the community about a few questions we have: How important is it that previous versions of Access can RUN applications (launch forms, change data values) written in a newer version of Access? How important is it that previous versions of Access can EDIT applications (modify forms, change data schema) written in a newer version...

The Access team wants to learn more about who reads our blog, perceptions of Access in your organization, and what new features people would find valuable. We would appreciate it if you help us out by taking this short 12 question survey . Thanks

After 2 betas I’m glad to announce the release of the Microsoft Outlook Connector 12.1 – the add-in that puts your Windows Live Hotmail data in Outlook. Outlook Connector 12.1 provides a great synchronization experience with e-mail, contacts, and the free Windows Live Calendar service. Download it now ! As part of the 12.1 release, we have also made improvements to the e-mail and contacts synchronization that make this version of the connector faster and more robust. Thank you to everyone who contacted...

Hi! You’ve found the new home of the Microsoft Office Outlook Team Blog, your one-stop-shop for tips, tricks, and rants directly from the Outlook product team here at Microsoft. You may have seen some of our team members’ individual blogs out on the web, covering specific areas such as time management, search, and our extensibility platform. Now that we’re working on our next release we’ve decided to create a team blog where we can talk about a wider range of topics. We look forward to having folks...

Do you have questions about Office 2010? Want to learn more about Windows 7?  For the first time ever, MVPs from both Windows and Office have come together as a collaborative group for a special live chat. This event is a great opportunity to tap into the vast knowledge of these industry professionals who are regarded as the best in their field. All levels of experience are welcome from beginners and students to intermediate power users. PowerPoint MVPs Glenna Shaw and Echo Swinford will be...

I described the new Access UI in this post and this post way back in March. Now I'll run through how you program the ribbon UI using VBA. In a future post (we're still working out the content) I'll do another post on how to do the same thing using macros (so the app will run in disabled mode). Customized Ribbons The ribbon UI presents a ton of new flexibility for us creating Access and for you building apps on top of Access that wasn't there before. As described in the posts on the ribbons, there...

It’s exciting times for us here on the PowerPoint Engineering Team! Whiteboard brainstorms that began three years ago are now real live features, which are fully functional and ready for a test drive in the PowerPoint 2010 Beta !  As we pass this milestone, I thought it’d be fun to share the inside scoop as to how one of our features, Video Triggers , came to be… Video Triggers is a feature with which one can mark locations in a video (i.e. set bookmarks), and then trigger animation sequences...