The Windows Live Messenger 8.0 Managed Beta has now come to an end, and what a great beta it was, congratulations goes to the Windows Live Messenger Team, it was very well managed and it was great to talk to other beta participants.

I don’t think it could have got any better, well not unless we were all invited to the Windows Live Messenger Team Room to see them building Windows Live Messenger there and then, now that would be nice!

Now here are according to the Windows Live Messenger Team a few of the many areas where our feedback has made a difference:

• Improved sign-in performance. Thanks to your feedback, Windows Live Messenger 8.0 has the fastest sign-in of any version of Messenger.
• New UI and color changing. After many tries, your feedback helped us “get it right.”
• Great new features such as Sharing Folders, Offline IM and Live Contacts. You found many great bugs that improved the quality of each of these.
• Overall quality. Your relentless testing and reporting of memory leaks, crashes and UI glitches greatly improved this version of Messenger.

So what’s next now that the managed beta has come to an end, well we can only speculate as to when it will go final, one website was saying Friday 16th of June 2006.

But we are now hearing from an article on the same site that it won’t make this release date, so all I can say is that I’m sure we can expect to see Windows Live Messenger 8.0 going final very soon, and when I say very soon, I mean very soon!