Next Wave of Microsoft’s Windows Live Essentials Available Now

By: Alexander Kent|June 24, 2010No Comments

The next wave of Windows Live Essentials is now available for public beta testing. The Windows Live Essentials beta requires Windows Vista or Windows 7, and is available in English, French, Dutch, Japanese, Portuguese, Simplified Chinese, or Spanish.

Some of you will remember that those were the free lifestyle and leisure applications Microsoft included in Windows Vista but omitted from Windows 7, relying on people to download them instead if they wanted them. The reason for the Windows Live branding is because they integrate with Microsoft’s cloud services, like SkyDrive and the Windows Live social network. Users can organize photos, create photo galleries, edit home movies and share them all via e-mail, Facebook, Twitter, Flickr, YouTube and other channels.

As previously announced, this release of Essentials is focused on two things: connecting Windows 7 to the cloud services you already use, and making everyday tasks simpler, so that you can do more on your PC.

Connecting Windows 7 to the cloud
We’ve designed Essentials to connect your Windows experience to the web services you already use – not just the ones from Microsoft. The new betas of Windows Live Photo Gallery, Movie Maker, Mail, Writer, and Messenger connect to photo and video sharing (SkyDrive, Flickr, YouTube, Facebook, SmugMug), social networking (Facebook, MySpace, Linkedin), email (Hotmail, Gmail, Yahoo! Mail), blogging (Spaces, WordPress, Blogger), and document productivity (Office Web Apps) services. And the new Windows Live Sync keeps your files synchronized across multiple PCs and in the cloud. You can even directly access your PC over the web with Sync’s new remote desktop feature.

Making everyday tasks simpler and enabling new possibilities
People like to get creative on their PCs as much as they like seeing what everyone else has been up to. Whether it’s Retouch, Panoramic Stitch, or Photo Fuse in Photo Gallery, Auto Movie in Movie Maker, or photo email in the new Windows Live Mail, we think you’ll be excited by the new additions to Essentials that make advanced tasks, well, easy. If you haven’t yet tried Photo Fuse to merge together the best of several photos, it’s a lot of fun.

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So if you find yourself not knowing what to do in the long days of summer, or if you’re just curious, then check out the next version of Microsoft’s Windows Live Essentials software. The software suite is now available to eager beta testers.

Microsoft’s Windows Live Essentials package includes: