One of the ‘tools’ I’ve was most impressed with after departing Internowlogy is the suite of services hosted under the Live brand from Microsoft.  Let me clarify, when I left my job and didn’t have a new employer, it meant that while I had a personal email account, I didn’t have a professional account.  I was able to set up a professional email using Live and start managing my contacts, appointments and email both from my computer using Outlook and from my Mobile phone.  Of course, it hasn’t been all mistake free, one of my more important lessons has involved my Live identity management and one of my more challenging transitions with identity. But more on that in a moment.

I’ve not only continued to use Messenger and learned to leverage Live for email and such but I’ve leveraged the networking features of Live as well as the features of Skydrive to place documents that I need to share in a central location.  This is without even considering new development features like Mesh and Azure. 

Now onto my challenge with Live. Most people are at least reasonably familiar with Live Messenger and have used it.  If like me you’ve used it for a while – you may have set it up using your work email address – I now feel this is a mistake.  When I first signed up from Messenger, my thought process was that instead of setting up another email account that I would need to monitor. Instead I chose to point point my messenger account at my work email for a Live ID and go from there.  For most things this worked fine, but when it came time to leave Internowlogy this presented a problem. As you might imagine my old email address didn’t leave with me.  I however, wanted to keep in touch with the people I had added to messenger over the years.

The good news is that you can go to the account services and update the email address associated with your messenger account, the challenge is that even though it should only take one or two days, in my case it was taking well over a week.  Here I was looking to update my network and literally everyone – even the people who knew my new email couldn’t see me in Messenger and weren’t seeing my new email address because I was in this limbo state.  A coworker who left IK a few weeks before me (several people left IK in January of 2009) had the same problem and eventually just reverted his old account and created a new account and added all the new people.  I however, had contacted Microsoft and asked – hey what’s the status and was told yes, the change was working through.  So eventually even though it had been over a week I set up a second account on Live so that I could get contact with key people and over the next serveral days as my old account remained in limbo started to focus on this new account as my main contact point.

Eventually I had pretty much stopped checking the old account for a while, but I did a few weeks ago and lo and behold – the changes had finally made it so that I could see people and they could see me.  Now from the standpoint of email the change was easy – I just told account 1 to forward all my email to account 2 and then as I reply people saw the new address and did or didn’t update their contact.  No problem, and no different from having an alias on my main email account.  In otherwords from the standpoint of email everything still works fine.

On messenger however, I now need some way to combine these two Messenger contact lists.  I want to display/sign into both accounts at the same time.  I don’t want to bother some of my contacts with adding a new link for my other messenger account, so if someone has a good solution for that please let me know – because I know from experience that if a solution exists someone will let me know once I post this.

(BTW, as a note for all my contacts, you’ll see me online a bit less, my current employer blocks the IM ports so I’ll be online more from about 8PM Pacific onward.)