Microsoft were shouting from the rafters last month about their new version of Hotmail which would, among other things, integrate the new Office web apps directly into email. But then, with less than 1% of users upgraded the programme stalled.
Now Microsoft have come out with an update. In a blog post they’ve now said that “The Hotmail rollout continues to go along smoothly and we’re right on track with our release plan, having now upgraded nearly 50 million accounts on several different clusters.”
The blog post goes on to say that it takes time to roll out a service this large and complex. They go on to say…
In order to turn on the new features in Hotmail – features like conversation threads, QuickViews, and Filters – we need to build new indexes in the storage system for your email. These new indexes allow Hotmail to instantly show you mail from your contacts, or show you messages that contain photos, or let you organize your email by conversation.
We are currently running software on the site to create the right indexes for all the mail in your Inbox. That software must read from and write to the many, many hard drives where Hotmail data is stored. And, of course, it can’t get in the way of you accessing your inbox or receiving new emails. At the end of the day, we’re constrained by the “laws of physics” for how fast we can read and write thousands and thousands of hard disk drives!
When the indexing process is complete, we’ll be turning on the new Hotmail for all our users. We’ll continue to keep you posted on the progress right here on Inside Windows Live.
I for one am looking forward to trying it, but I’m sadly not in the 1% of users who already have it. We’ll see how the rollout goes and hopefully we’ll all soon have far better webmail.
