My family and I recently traveled from Sammamish, Washington to Thailand for a winter vacation, and it really struck me how much things have changed in the last few years with regards to technology.
For one thing, I didn’t need to spend time looking for Internet cafes on this trip, because Wi-Fi was everywhere—in cafes and hotels especially. On the other hand, it wasn’t available in the apartment where we were staying, so I was often in need of tools I could use both offline and online. The solution that worked for me and my family? Windows Live.
Full disclosure: I do work for Microsoft, but not on anything related to Windows Live, so many of the features of Windows Live were as new to me as to any of you out there. I was pleasantly surprised by how incredibly helpful it was to have Windows Live along on this trip.
Here are a few highlights of how Windows Live worked to help us stay in touch while we traveled.
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Windows Live Mail
The web is great, but Wi-Fi connections aren’t always available, and they sometimes cut out at inopportune moments. Sometimes it’s nice to be able to download your mail while you have a good connection, and then read it later. With Windows Live Mail on my laptop (a free downloadable program; part of Windows Live Essentials), whenever I found a Wi-Fi network to connect to, I’d open Windows Live Mail, click the Sync button (note: this used to be called Send/receive), and it downloaded all my mail while I worked on other things. I could then read my mail later back at our rental apartment where we didn’t have any Wi-Fi.
Another advantage to Windows Live Mail is that we could download mail from all our e-mail accounts at once, instead of having to go to several different e-mail websites. Great on vacation when you’d rather be out snorkeling than waiting around for various webpages to load.
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Windows Live Photo Gallery
We could work offline to upload all our pictures from the camera, tag the pictures, add captions, and then, when we had a Wi-Fi connection, I selected the photos I wanted to post online, and published them as a photo album up on Windows Live Photos. Our friends and family (anyone we gave permission to view the albums), got to see our photos even before we came back from vacation. -
Windows Live Writer
This is another great product to help you work offline, in this case, for blogging and publishing photos. With Writer, I was able to write all my blog posts offline, and take time to have my wife review them, and to consult our travel books for the correct names of all the sites we’d visited. Once we connected to Wi-Fi, I just clicked Publish. By the way, Writer allows you to publish to almost any blog service you use, not just Windows Live Spaces.
Writer also allowed me to easily include maps of where we were traveling, and helped me arrange a series of thumbnails of the pictures I’d published earlier, so I could link to them from my blog. -
Windows Live Spaces
We use Spaces as a family website where all our pictures are available, along with our blog posts. Our extended family has it bookmarked and visits regularly to get all our latest updates and photos. -
Windows Live Profile
“What’s new with Kevin” on my profile page allowed my friends to keep up with all my new blog posts, pictures, and Twitter updates as they happened. They only see an update under “What’s new with Kevin” if they have permission to view the content that it refers to. For example, my blog posts are public, so all of those updates appear to anyone who visits my profile, but I shared my photo albums with family and friends only, so people I don’t know don’t see any updates about my photos. -
Twitter and Facebook
These aren’t Windows Live products, of course, but they do work with Windows Live. Since so many of our friends use these services, their compatibility with Windows Live made it easy for more people to follow along on our adventures. I used a Windows Live Writer extension called Twitter Notify to send an automatic update to Twitter every time I published a new blog post. I also set up Twitter to update Facebook, and added Twitter as a web activity on Windows Live so that my tweets appeared in my Windows Live “What’s new” list, too.
Soon you’ll also be able to add Facebook as a web activity on Windows Live. Either way, every time I add a blog entry, my friends on Windows Live, Twitter, and Facebook are all updated. No need to update in more than one place!
It was great to be able to stay so connected during our family vacation. I hope you enjoy trying out a few of these features yourself. Have you used Windows Live to stay in touch with friends when you’re out of town? Leave a comment and let us all know how else you’ve used Windows Live.
Happy travels!
- Kevin Bartholomae
Microsoft
