When Windows Live Calendar out of beta recently, I didn’t really paying attention to it. That’s because I already have calendar in Outlook and Google Calendar for work and personal stuff respectively. Few days back, the new  Yahoo Calendar Beta released, which I’d wrote few comparisons between it with Google Calendar. So now, all major internet players has new calendar out, to win users with new looks and functionality.

Yahoo and Microsoft has their own web calendar before known as Yahoo Calendar (similar name) and MSN Calendar respectively. It is only beginning last year, they hauled their calendar to better compete with fast ajax-based Google Calendar out earlier.

But not that I want to write today, I love app interfacing (not GUI ok), just like my days job

Great thing about Windows Live era is, Microsoft started paying an attention to connect their web application run on the cloud with client based application. The new Outlook connector 12.1 is one such thing. It allow users to manage Hotmail (emails and contacts) and Windows Live Calendar from Microsoft Outlook (2007 and 2003). If you want to download your Hotmail (use POP3) to other email applications, read this post.

From within Microsoft Outlook, you can edit contact, calendar, compose email  and Outlook Connector will synchronize the data between Microsoft Outlook to Hotmail and Windows Live Calendar seamlessly so your data is stay updated all the time. One thing to remember however, you can’t view (and update) your Microsoft Outlook calendar in Windows Live Calendar which is quite disappointing. Anyway let’s hope that, this is going to happen in the next release.

If you’re currently running Outlook Connector 12.0 with outgoing MSN Calendar, read this post carefully before making an upgrade.