Outlook.com News & Articles

Launch a Gchat session right from an Outlook.com email message with the Google contacts integration.

Google's instant messaging service has been integrated into the Microsoft universe, at least when it comes to the Web based Outlook.com and the cloud based SkyDrive storage app.

The move form Hotmail to Outlook.com is over. It's official. According to a post on the Microsoft Office blog, everyone on Hotmail has been upgraded and everyone that doesn't already have access to the features Microsoft has been adding over the past months will be given access in the coming months.

In another small step forward for Outlook.com, Microsoft has announced that it is making Skype available through the Outlook.com interface. However, unless you are part of a small group of people in the UK that have been offered access to a small beta test, you will have to wait until a little bit later in the year for the new functionality.

In light of the ongoing change-over from Hotmail to Outlook.com, news from Microsoft that it has upgrade its Outlook.com app for Android.

This week has been a busy one for Microsoft. Outlook.com went down because of overheating in data centers while there have been a couple of releases for SharePoint including Metalogix for big files and ShareVault’s document transfer for SharePoint. Kofax has also upgraded is capture capabilities.

 Trouble with Outlook.com is now in its second day as Microsoft struggles to resume service to many users, spread around the world. 

In December we took a look at Microsoft’s Hotmail email replacement service Outlook.com to see how it was coming along. At the time Microsoft said that about 25 million people had made the jump with a lot more getting ready. Two months later, users number 60 million, the new service is out of Preview and able to scale to one billion users.

There’s nothing like the season of goodwill to bring out the best in technology giants. In the case of Microsoft and Google, just when you might have thought they couldn’t find anything else to fight over, they’ve started slinging shots at each other over email and contacts synching.

By the looks of things, we are entering the End of Days for Hotmail. In spite of this, Microsoft is still not finished tinkering under the hood of Outlook.com, Hotmail's replacement, having just introduced new security features that should improve it.

Windows 8 has been declared RTM, or released to manufacturing, by Microsoft, sending it to the hundreds of hardware partners for installation and testing on their PCs, notebooks and tablets. But what does the road to launch look like for businesses and developers? 

 Microsoft has claimed over a million sign-ups on the first day of its new Outlook.com email service, with the promise of a far great experience through improved interaction with attachments and wider links to social media. With plans to migrate the millions of Microsoft Hotmail users, will it attract users from Yahoo, Gmail and other services?