We’re leaving the “Beta tag” blanket at home.  That’s right…thanks to your beta testing and feedback; we’ve now officially launched Windows Live Custom Domains.  Our colleagues over in Messenger kicked off the Windows Live launch season last week.  Along with the launch of OneCare and Live Favorites, we're excited to continue the momentum.  Windows Live is about the Web, the way you want it.  Personalization is a key piece here, and let's face it...your identity online is central to that.  Custom Domains enables people to use all of the Windows Live and MSN services they want with an ID that's as unique to them as they want it to be.

For those who aren’t familiar with Custom Domains, we provide free hosted e-mail for your domain.  Let’s say you own the domain name, “wingtiptoys.com.”   With Custom Domains, you get unlimited, free e-mail accounts at that domain.  You can open accounts for sales@wingtiptoys.com, owner@wingtiptoys.com, etc.  Oh wait, did we mention that it’s free?  This isn’t one of those “free during beta” trial offers.  This is free for life. 

New Feature: Open Membership

We’re jazzed about a new feature we’ve added called Open Membership.  How does this work?  Let’s say you run a website called “soccerfan.com.”  Your users love your site and want an e-mail address @soccerfan.com.  Prior to this launch, each user would have to request an e-mail account from the administrator.  Then, the admin would manually approve and create each account.  We’ve made things much easier all around with this launch.

With the Open Membership featured enabled, we provide URL links so users can automatically sign-up for an e-mail account @soccerfan.com.  Admins no longer have to burden with the manual creation of email accounts, and users get accounts immediately.  Users will love their new email because it’s a brand new MSN Hotmail or Windows Live Mail beta account with a highly personalized @soccerfan.com domain name.  Web site owners will love it because their users help promote the site.  Also, users will re-visit the host site often to check their e-mail.

Featured Customer: Waterloo, Belgium

Our newest customer is the Belgian city of Waterloo.  They’re offering free @waterloo.eu MSN Hotmail accounts to 30,000 Waterloo citizens.  We’re honored to partner with Waterloo to offer this new technology to their citizens.  If you’re an organization or business looking to provide e-mail to your users, come check us out!

Thanks again to our beta testers who have helped develop the service – we’ve learned a lot.  We will have more features to come, so come back and visit often!

The team is proud to introduce the latest release of Windows Live Custom Domains for you to try out. Visit the new site at http://domains.live.com. We have worked hard to incorporate your feedback into this release, and want to thank all of you for trying our service during the Beta period.

Here are the major highlights of this release:

• The most noticeable improvement is in the user interface. We think the new UI will make navigation easier than ever.
• We've introduced an exciting new feature called Open Membership (more details below).
• We've improved our error messages and added contextual Help.
• We've increased our browser support to include Firefox and the upcoming IE7. And we work on Mosaic and Opera (these 2 browsers not officially supported).

Open Membership will allow you to create e-mail accounts in your domain directly from your website. This is a great way for clubs and affinity groups to reach out to a broad audience and create communities of users with your domain name included in their Windows Live ID. And all you have to do is register your domain with the service, select Open Membership, and add webpage code that we provide to allow users to sign up. Let us know what you think about this new feature.

We hope you enjoy the improved service. Note that we have closed down comments on this blog site since we want to devote the site to announcing updates. We still value your feedback and encourage you to visit our feedback site and our new developer site.
 
Thank you,
WLCD Team