In addition to the product planning I do for Windows Live, I also work with the Microsoft Office Outlook team on the Outlook Connector.  What is the Outlook Connector you ask?  It is a grossly underutilized sync solution for people who are both Hotmail users and who have Outlook 2003 or 2007.  If you’re interested in the technical details of what it does, take a look at, Omar’s blog (my coworker in Windows Live).  Basically, it syncs your Hotmail email, calendar, and contacts via a technology called DeltaSync (multiply the functionality of IMAP by 10x <g>).  

Sadly, doing a search in your favorite search for the words “sync Outlook with Hotmail” (no quotes) yields very few results (other than Omar’s) for the Outlook Connector, so I doubt many people can find it.  That’s a shame because I know from my research that people want to easily interchange work and personal items (mainly calendar and contacts).   The Outlook Connector makes that possible!   I use it on each of the 7 PCs I frequently use.  Its incredibly powerful.  If you receive an email to your work email account that is really personal when you reply you can change which account its sent from to be your Hotmail account.  With Outlook’s side by side calendar support (see link and picture below), you can drag an appointment from your work calendar on the left to your Hotmail Calendar on the right. 

You can get the Outlook Connector from http://download.live.com.  If you install the entire Essentials suite and have Outlook on your PC it’ll be automatically installed.  You can also just pick the OLC if for some reason you didn’t want the rest of Windows Live Essentials.

Here’s my cheap way of increasing the likelihood that someone will be able to find this post:

sync, synchronization, Hotmail, Outlook, 2003, 2007, Exchange, e-mail, calendar, contacts, Microsoft 

:-)