With a new unified contacts list, shared calendars and customised invitations, you won't need to sweat next time you're organising a party, get-together or one-on-one.
The new Windows Live is all about getting the various strands of your online life together in one place. For most of us, the intersection between life online and life as it happens is a busy one, and in some cases can become totally blurred. But even if you're not the type to arrange all of your comings and goings over the Web, you might just find some of the features on the new Windows Live could change all of that.
Unified contacts and the 'What's New' feed
These days, it can be hard keeping up to date with your friends, both online and offline. Your friends on Messenger and the people who you work with, even your boss, may never come into contact with each other. And when you've got school friends on Facebook and those one or two friends who still use e-mail and nothing else, that means you've got contacts across a whole range of online services and networks. It's a lot easier just to catch up with everyone in the one place right?
The Windows Live People page can do just that: bringing together all of your contacts from across the Windows Live suite, Microsoft Outlook and Outlook Express, as well as Gmail and Yahoo! Mail.
So when it comes time to getting a big group together for your next celebration, it pays to be able to access all of your contacts from the one place, so you can set up the one event and send out the one invitation, rather than having to individually update your friends over each service.
It's not all one-way traffic though. The new Windows Live works both ways. If you set up an event using Facebook or one of our other social networking partners, it automatically appears as an update in the "What's New" feeds of your closest Windows Live contacts, and anyone else you've approved as a subscriber to your feed. Likewise, you can see when one of your friends has organised an event using another service through your "What's New" feed if they're one of your Windows Live contacts.
Events
Using Windows Live Events, you can create and send out custom invites using personalised templates, themes, photos and layout options. The RSVP tracking feature also lets you keep an eye on who's in, who's out and who needs a poke in the eye as a reminder.
Shared calendars
You can make your Windows Live calendar available to any of your Windows Live contacts, so your friends can check when you're free for an event, or if you're already planning on going. You can also sync your Facebook calendar to Windows Live in just a few easy steps .
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