Today marks the premiere of a new program named Health Tech Today, which features informative interviews with some of the world's top health leaders; compelling health-related personal stories; and the latest new technology and IT innovations.  The show is hosted by Dr. Bill Crounse and the premiere episode features an interview with eHealth adovcate, Nobel Peace Prize winner, Archbishop Desmond Tutu.

So what does this have to do with Messenger and why are we writing about it on the MessengerSays blog?

Besides being a great show on a topic that many of us feel passionate about, we’re happy to say that Windows Live Messenger was used to conduct all of the remote video interviews.  A few weeks prior to the recording of the first episode we were approached by the producers asking if we thought the Messenger video call functionality would work for the live interviews they wanted to conduct with guests from all around the world.  We said ‘of course’ and after a quick discussion it was clear that Messenger would indeed meet all their needs.

The producers explained to us that they would typically have to transport the guests to a studio and pay a hefty fee to setup a live satellite-link.  They were very excited at how simple it was to setup a video call and not only did they save money (free!), but the guests didn’t even have to leave their homes to do the interviews.

This was a great win-win situation for everyone (except maybe the satellite-link owners) and the team is looking forward to hearing about more instances where our technology was used to bring things like this together.

Check out the episode for yourself at http://www.microsoft.com/industry/healthcare/healthtechtoday 

Try a video call yourself!

Thanks,
Tolga & Lonn
Windows Live Messenger Team

In September, we began asking users on 8.1 clients to upgrade to the latest version of messenger to ensure that they had the most up to-date and secure release.  (see post)

Starting today, users on version 8.5 will also be required to upgrade before they can sign-in to the service.  Starting on the November 9th, users on Messenger 2009 (version 14) will need to upgrade their clients too.  Users who have already installed the latest version, which was released Aug 18th 2009 (Build: 14.0.8089.726),  will not be required to upgrade.

If you are using Messenger 2009 and are curious what version you have, you can go to the Help –> About Menu.

If you have any issues or questions during the upgrade process, here are the places you can go to get some answers.

Note: Users on Windows XP will need to ensure that they have installed Service Pack 2 (SP2) or higher, otherwise the upgrade will not work.  Instructions to install the latest Service Pack (SP3) can be found here.  Additionally, here is more information about the system requirements.

Thanks for everyone’s continued support.

Sincerely,
The Windows Live Messenger Team