The Office Live Beta team have just completed a “Refresh” of their Beta of Office Live and have posted a team blog post detailing what’s new:

Essentials now fully supports Outlook Connector
Essentials inboxes now have email, contacts, and calendar access enabled for Microsoft Office Outlook connector.  What is that you say?  Outlook Connector (download it here if you have inbox created via your Essentials subscription) is an add-on for Outlook which will allow you to connect directly to your Office Live inbox using Microsoft Office Outlook 2002 (XP) or later.  Once connected you can read and write email as well as access your contacts and calendar using Outlook.  Using Outlook connector you can always be in sync with your Office Live Inbox, have offline access to your information, and access any number of Office Live Essentials created inboxes from one central place (simply add the multiple email accounts to Outlook).  A link to download Outlook Connector will also be available in the Member Center if you have an inbox created in an Essentials subscription.  So if you’re already an Essentials customer, try it out today; if you’re a Basics subscriber maybe this will be the reason to upgrade to Essentials 😉

If you are already a customer today the two links below provide some more information specific to Outlook Connector and Office Live (sorry, you have to be a logged-in customer to view these links):  Benefits of Outlook Connector & Getting Started with Outlook Connector.

Owners now get a monthly report on their site
Each month the owner of the subscription should look to their inbox for an Activity Report.  This report has a summary of information available directly on the Office Live site but neatly packaged to give you a quick overview of what’s been happening in the last month on your business site.  There are different reports for Basics, Collaboration, and Essentials but the basic information given is:

• Storage and bandwidth used for your web site
• Unique visitors and page views for your web site
• Search engines and keywords for the month
• Referring domains and sites for the month
• # of email accounts utilized
• Users and roles for your shared sites (Collaboration owners only)
• Names and links for your shared sites (Collaboration owners only)

Our emails to you can be updated faster
This is more of a backend change but the emails you receive (Welcome mails, alerts about your storage limits, etc) can now be updated much more rapidly to better serve the customer.  So, if there are parts of the mails you receive today that you find confusing or you have suggestions to improve the mails please let us know!

Backend changes to help the future
We have also made a large number of backend changes which will be the foundation for changes to come later.  Today we are still in Beta but in the not-so-distant future we will be out of Beta and fully released.  When that happens we’ll have many new features and we plan to have many, many more over the years to come!  But, to accomplish all this future growth we need to lay a solid foundation.  Some of the first major blocks of that foundation were put in place with this refresh of Office Live

Via: Office Live Beta Team Blog