While at Redmond last week I had a chance to meet with some members of the Windows Live Custom Domains team. I pushed or asked for three requests:
– Ability to sign up directly for an @yourdomain address directly without an administrator approval
– Branding or customization of a domain by way of preselecting a default logo or theme for the site
– Banner Advertisement Sharing
– Mailing Lists
These requests were selfishly motivated to try and determine when I might be able to switch Mail service from Everyone.net to Windows Live Custom Domains. I figured I would deal with issues such as mail and user account migration once the above issues were resolved. To my surprise I found out that Microsoft had released a Custom Domains SDK to address some of these issues and earlier this morning I came across a news item from Bink.nu indicating that Frameworks had released a new application called Windows Live Custom Domains Manager. The application allows you to:
- Veirfy Service Status
- Verify MX Configuration
- Add New Users
- Delete Users
- Import Existing Users
- Evict Existing Users
- Import User List
- Export User List
- Centralized Multi-domain Management
Now it seems like the only pressing issue is branding or customization of the domain and then I think I may actually switch to Windows Live Custom Domains.