I've been following Microsoft's launch of Live.com or Windows Live as it's officially called and the other offerings included under ideas.live.com. I've raved about Windows Live Custom Domains and I finally got an invite to try out Live Mail. Live Mail is essentially a replacement for Hotmail and it is AJAX enabled with 3-panes ala Outlook with drag and drop capabilities and a snappy and responsive interface. Firefox support is there but it still needs some work while IE offers all of the rich functionality.
I am a loyal Google Mail user and so I am not planning on switching over any time soon but it's great to see Microsoft up the ante in the free email space and compete with Google and Yahoo. I still haven't seen Yahoo's new AJAX enabled email client and so I cannot compare but GMail is still very robust and feature-rich in comparison to Live Mail. Live Mail is still in early beta and so I am hoping the feature-set keeps on growing and offer Google a compelling reason to keep on improving GMail.
Here are screenshots of Live Mail Beta in action. I'll post more after I spend some time with it but the calendar feature looks very nice. While Google calendar is still missing in action, Live Mail does have a nice calendar feature that competes with some of the Web2.0 calendar apps out there.
- The Mail page or your Inbox view:
- The Compose New Mail Page:
- The Calendar Page:
The one thing that's really interesting to me is the emergence of Live.com as a portal framework with ASP.NET 2.0, WebParts and all the stuff. Once Live.com is actually live and if it ever gets out of beta (maybe that will be Web3.0 :)), it will be compelling development platform for people that use .NET for their development. And where does that leave SharePoint?
