Redmond, Washington — In tandem with this week’s launch of Office 2010, on Tuesday, Microsoft’s Windows Live blog declared that it has also commenced rolling out its next-generation version of the “Hotmail Wave 4” to the 360 million worldwide users of the venerable web mail service. An update that contains support for larger attachments and new views for looking at attached photos and documents.
The updated email service comprises of a new “Sweep” feature to tidy up inboxes, which allows users to easily divert mail from a particular sender into either a new folder or into the trash, integration with Microsoft’s new Office Web Apps, and a Gmail-like conversation view. The company says that it is advancing to the new service one server cluster at a time–and it has hundreds of such clusters–so not everyone will get the upgrade right away.
“If you do not see these features today, please hold on just a little while longer,” Microsoft Program Manager Mike Schackwitz said in a blog post on Tuesday. “Everybody will be upgraded this summer.”
The company previewed the new-look Hotmail at an event last month.The new Hotmail features a slightly revised UI, along with numerous new features, including anti-clutter tools, integration with Office Web Apps (OWA), huge new attachment limits thanks to SkyDrive cloud-based storage integration, and more.
Among some of its refined features, the Hotmail update now allows attachments of up to 10GB, the creation and viewing of slideshows from attached photos as well as integration with the new Office Web Apps for viewing and editing document attachments.
In addition to this, the new version also allows users to tie in with their existing social network activity, such as that from Twitter and Facebook, along with ability to view photos or videos from third-party services, such as Flickr, SmugMug, Hulu, and YouTube, all without having to leave Hotmail.
Some features, unfortunately, are locale-specific. So, OWA integration will first roll out to Hotmail customers in the United States, Canada, United Kingdom, and Ireland, and then to customers in other countries later in the year, according to Microsoft.
If not an enormous-ever update to Hotmail, it is at least the whopping since a major overhaul four years ago.
Have a peek at the new Hotmail here.