Windows Live Messenger is the latest release of Microsoft's popular IM client and it integrates everything from live collaborative photo viewing to search results sharing giving now truly visible hints of how important the instant messaging platform will be in the future of conferencing, collaboration and live presentation activities online.

Windows Live Messenger Beta gets touted by Microsoft as "the next-generation MSN Messenger" and after my own extended testing on it, I can assure you that, while I would not yet recommend Live Messenger as your immediate next IM out there, this new release has truly an impressive set of integrated features and capabilities that are a must to see and learn from.

In this new edition, makes Live Messenger a springboard for several other conferencing-like activities, though limited to a one-to-one collaboration setting. Application sharing, whiteboarding, file and photo sharing are now all available to you directly from within your IM.

Other interesting new additions include the ability to connect and share documents with contacts in a supereasy fashion, a fully automated message archival feature for all your IM exchanges, greatly enhanced video conferencing (one on one only), integrated search, integrated and navigable advertising tabs and paid SMS-texting abilities.

Everything is limited to a maximum of two parties and there is no cost or subscription to pay to access anyone of these services.

Not everything works intuitively in Live Messenger and the user interface remains one of the major stumbling blocks to this instant messaging application. Live Messenger UI is cluttered with too many things, including now an excessive amount of advertising or commercially related information elements.

Worst of all the overall interface remains under the domain of north american teenage audience preferences, giving little in to becoming more usable, serious, and appealing to professional audiences wanting to leverage this powerful communication and collaboration tool for non-trivial uses.

But don't be fooled. This is not an easy challenge. Convoq, Groove, and several others have long understood this vision and steered toward it, but UI design, usability and technical performance issues have been preventing these tools from becoming true innovative new collaboration platforms.

Here more details:

Inside the new Windows Live Messenger access to commands is both via a nested set of text menus or via a set of standard menus that can be displayed on top of the IM window.

Live Messenger keeps strong binds with Microsoft Office applications like Outlook, which can be invoked right from the top part of the Live Messenger interface. (Frankly, having recently abandoned Outlook in favour of web-based email, I would have preferred an option that allowed me to select which email application to call and not be forced into having to check my email via Outlook.)

All text chat messages are now saved automatically inside Live Messenger unless you opt not to have this feature active.

Note, that as I have been recently writing I see instant messaging tools as adopting gradually many of the email key management and archiving features and facilities to soon start seriously replacing email as a preferred, faster, easier and less spam-infected messaging platform.

Another feature that indicates that Live Messenger too is moving in this direction is the new offline messaging facility which allows you to send and receive messages from your contacts even when you or them are offline. Just like Skype and other major IMs do, the messages are simply stored and forwarded to the recipient the next time he or she comes online.

The Live Messenger set of emoticons is quite rich but leaves a lot to be desired. Emoticons still reflect the teenager look with which they have been born with. Not very enticing for a professional user. Also, the pictorial, illustrative style of such icons, takes away from their immediacy and legibility. Yahoo, and Skype remain significantly ahead of the pack on this front from my viewpoint.

On the contacts management front, Live Messenger allows the creation of custom "groups" as to facilitate the handling of large contact lists.

But back to Windows Live Messenger (aka MSN Messenger 8.0) new major key features and their details:

Sharing Folder

The Sharing Folder feature of Windows Live Messenger offers an alternative to the current "direct transfer" facility offered on several instant messengers and allowing you to send files in real-time to your IM contacts in a true P2P fashion. When you want to deliver a file to someone else you can now utilize the "Sharing Folder" window.

You can create a Sharing Folder by simply dragging files onto a contact name in Messenger. This will create an exact copy of the files on both you and your contact's computers, and create a Sharing Folder that can be accessed from Messenger, and on the desktop.

The Sharing Folder is easier to use than e-mail for sharing photos and documents. In a Sharing Folder, any time a file in the folder is added, modified, or deleted, those changes are synchronized with your contact(s). The great plus is that you can always access a Sharing Folder from your own Windows desktop, even when you are offline.

In order to minimize the risk of virus-infected transfers, the "Sharing Folder" feature is bundled with an anti-virus program.

Sharing Folder can only be used on computers with NTFS formatted hard disks.

PC-to-phone calls

In addition to PC-to-PC calls that have been supported in previous versions, Windows Live Messenger now supports PC-to-phone calls. The rates during the beta period are 2.3 cents per minute to and from North America and Western Europe.

By signing up with Verizon and using Windows Live Phone Call in Messenger, you can start making calls right away. You can purchase minutes up front from Verizon, and then add minutes when your balance runs low.

Interestingly, the Liveside site points out that Windows Live Messenger cordless phones are now available for purchase, providing a hard-to-match web-software-hardware integration.

Video conferencing

Great improvements on this front: real-time full-screen 640x480 lip-synched video is now possible. You now have a full one-to-one video conferencing ability limited only by the quality of your hardware and by the Internet bandwidth you have available.

Specifically, these are major new innovations introduced in this version:
a) Enhanced image resolution

b) Full-screen view

c) Voice/video synchronization

d) Ability to run multiple concurrent one-to-one video conversations.

Connecting to another party for a video call takes some time. The connection is not made instantaneously. Once connected the quality of the audio-video conversation is good, and while the audio quality does not surpass Skype's, the video one certainly does by offering near perfect lip-synch, high frame rates (smoother movement), multiple display sizes up to full screen and one-click audio muting and freezing of the video image.

SMS text messaging

Live Messenger allows you to reach your extended network of contacts, within and beyond your Messenger list via SMS text messages. Once you have set up an account you can start sending text messages to any mobile phone and your contacts can also message back at your mobile when you are not reachable on the web.

(The feature seems not to be yet fully enabled. I was not able to setup my mobile account as indicated and clicking on the mobile setup button provoked no actions).

Integrated search

Search is now fully integrated inside instant messaging. The new Live Messenger brings together into one application at least three ways with which to access MSN based search results.

The most interesting and innovative is the collaborative search which allows you to open an integrated search window next to your IM main interface.

In the search results appearing within it after a query, each result item has two icons which greatly facilitate collaboration: the first allows you to send that URL with one click to your instant messaging partner.

The other allows you to preview in real-time the content of any results showing up.

Among the extra facilities accessible from the vertical advertising bar there is also direct access to several MSN-based online services, including MSN Search and/or Desktop Search. These can be fully run within the Live Messenger main interface though with some not so elegant results.

In addition a discrete search box is also always accessible from within the very bottom part of main IM interface.

Collaborative Photo Browsing

An integrated application called Photoswap (but it has different names depending on your language) gets installed when you want to activate this facility which allows you to upload a number of digital images (this could actually be PowerPoint slides saved as images) and showing them in real-time to the person you are communicating with.

The tool is well designed, simple to use and effective. Watching photograph together while instant messaging someone else has indeed never been simpler.

Integrated whiteboard

Live Messenger breaks completely new ground in the instant messaging arena by being also the first to fully integrated a whiteboard facility within the IM text chat area. This is a world first, and definitely worth taking note as you will see more and more of this integrated facilities popping up inside your favourite IM client.

Unfortunately the whiteboard implementation, is nothing more than a cute attempt at providing a facility that requires a lot more thought, features and effective UI design than this first version provides.

Glaringly lacking are drawing tools outside of the default set freehand, that can be used effectively only by those with tablet PCs or supported by graphic tablets with wireless pens. For everyone else using a mouse or a trackpad this is the usual, ten year old nonsense of integrating a tool that does more harm than good. Anything drawn with a freehand tool on today's computer is in fact guaranteed to make those who draw it look like as a first grader attempting to draw something meaningful on a blackboard.

Also visibly missing are the ability to combine text and drawing, which are now two fully separated functions, and an import facility to upload existing images.

Application Sharing

The Live Messenger application sharing facility allows you to show in real-time your PC screen to your live contact(s). When activated and accepted by the other user, the facility allows you to select which application window you want to "show".

You need to have Live Messenger 8 and all of the required SP2 updates on your system to have this facility run. When I have tested with Marjolein Hoekstra, she was required to install Windows Messenger and when she followed up with that request she was taken to the SP2 update web site.

Even after multiple tests I have not been able to make this feature work. Discomforting.

Integrated advertising

Live Messenger now sports a long, vertical and scrollable list of icons in the left part of the IM window. All icons after the first one, which is used to display your full contact list, all other icons represent commercial brands.

By clicking on any one of these brand icons the Live Messenger main window transforms itself into a mini-browser showcasing HTML-based advertising content customized for this display.

Short voice message recording

A one-click feature also allows to easily record brief voice messages that can be exchanged with your Live Messenger contacts. During a text chat exchange you can simply hold down the F2 function key and record a personal voice message that your conversation partner will be able to listen to. Effective.

Other notable extras

Your Hotmail contact list is directly accessible through Live Messenger.

You can see who has recently updated their Spaces blog look by checking for a little gleam appearing next to your contact names in Live Messenger.
Really too many to list here.

More customization

Among some of the new useful features is the ability to customize contacts nicknames in much any way you want.

You can also make some changes to the Windows Live Messenger "look and feel" template, including selecting the specific color scheme that it will use. Color scheme can now be chosen for the entire application, including the status window, and not just the conversation windows.

Cons:

Works only on Windows PCs. Communicates only with other Windows Messengers and not with contacts that have other instant messaging platforms.
Any true and effective instant messenger needs to be able to interoperate with other IMs and needs to be accessible from any computer and major operating system out there.

Intrusive advertising. The advertising window at the bottom is not very promising. Much better if it was an optional display area that user themselves could use to communicate a statement, message, brand sponsor or whatever other they would like to show, among a set of alternative options.

Organizing contacts offers basic options but fails to provide me with what I need the most: group contacts by those who have communicated with most recently, or by those with whom I exchange the most. Disappointing.

No access to key functions via icons/buttons on the main interface. Accessing commands requires accessing menus. Frustrating.

Zero shortcuts listed in the five available menus. There are some, but you get to learn about them only after having issued the command for which you needed them. Frustrating.

Interface clutter. Overall interface tends to get easily cluttered with too much advertising and commercial intrusion. The tool looses its "feel" as a professional communication tool while retaining its negative superficial traits and connotations: noisy, distracting, for teenagers not for business, not innovative in the user experience aspects. The exact opposite of Google's own IM solution: GoogleTalk. Disappointing.

Documentation and help information available are rather limited and containing for now only essential, basic information. I could not find any detailed information for example on the SMS Mobile settings or about the specifics on the claims made in the documentation that define Live Messenger as being able to interoperate with other instant messaging networks and with other video conferencing tools on other operating systems. Disappointing.

Buggy.
This is a Beta version and we should clearly expect many things not to work. For now Application Sharing seems to be the component most exposed to malfunctioning while most other functions do work, but not always at the first click and often requiring annoying and complex updating procedures.

System requirements

Windows Live Messenger is a Windows XP-only product (it will not work on previous Windows versions) and you need Internet Explorer 6 with SP1 or later on your machine to download it. Also, you need to have a Passport account.

Windows Live Messenger requires you to use Internet Explorer to download it.

Try it out

Download Windows Live Messenger (Beta).

Note: you need Internet Explorer to download the installation file.

Learn more

Official information page on Windows Live Messenger.

Official MSN Space for Windows Live Messenger.

Windows Live Messenger FAQ and Support.

Windows Live Homepage.

Provide your feedback

Photo credit: almaoscura