Welcome back to all those that were on vacation, and a happy new year. As you may have noticed from relative inactivity in my blogging, it’s been quite a hectic time here on the product development team. We’ve been hard at work on our next release, and I am pleased to let you know that we hit an important milestone right before the end of the year. That is, our development and test work is done on the next major release of OneCare, and as we announced about a month ago, it will indeed be available – both at retail and on the Web - at the end of January. There may be some slight variations by country, but for the most part, you should be able to download or buy in just a few weeks. And for those of you who already subscribe, you need to do – nothing. You’ll automatically receive this major upgrade, just as you receive minor upgrades throughout the year, as part of your OneCare subscription.

For all you beta testers, we greatly appreciate the feedback you’ve provided. This release was particularly challenging with respect to the testing, since we had to make sure it worked well on a new OS (Windows Vista), and on many new language platforms. Although we have a great test team spread around the world, there is no feedback like user feedback, and we got plenty of it. I am also pleased to know that all of you who wanted to install OneCare on your non-English PCs will be able to purchase OneCare officially in your markets. While we don’t cover the whole world, we are looking forward to creating long-lasting relationships with customers in nearly 20 countries (and counting).

A few other house-keeping things to mention. There have been a number of good questions on the blog about OneCare – some regarding specific features, and others regarding help and support issues. I know it can be very frustrating when things don’t work as you expect. However, I would strongly encourage any user with problems or issues using OneCare to go to our Help Center (http://www.windowsonecare.com/support/Default.aspx). We have a great tool for instant support that is continuously fine-tuned to answer users’ most frequent questions, and it also has compiled a large database of issues that can help you quickly solve your problem. Generally, this is the fastest way to get an issue resolved. But, if you can’t get a good answer, or still need support, you can always contact the OneCare support team. As we’ve mentioned many times, part of our mission is to provide great service – both when using the product and interacting with us – so we frequently poll customers on their level of satisfaction. It is encouraging that a very high percentage of our customers are highly satisfied with their support experience, either using the online tools or interacting with support agents. So, please be assured we can help you with OneCare problems you may have.

I also want to note, for those that are a bit more technically inclined, we have a very active and extremely well-informed set of users that post questions and answers to our forums. If you have a specific question, and are comfortable reading through and acting on self-help info on the Web, this is your place to go: http://forums.microsoft.com/windowsonecare/default.aspx?siteid=2. I’d also like to thank our most prolific MVP – Stephen Boots – who consistently posts thoughtful, informed, and helpful comments to the forums. Thanks Stephen, and all the other MVPs that do such a great job answering questions and moderating the forums.

At this point, you may be wondering why we have multiple sites for user feedback, and how we use them. It is important to note that the blog is a great forum for us to report on developments, latest news, common questions, etc. It isn’t the best place for frequent back and forth dialogue, which is why you don’t see many direct responses to comments on the blog. Please know that we read every comment on the blog, but won’t likely be responding to most of them. The forum, however, is a great place for give and take. As I mentioned, there is a very active community of users that are both passionate and knowledgeable about our product, and they probably do as good a job as we do in responding to questions, and providing help on a range of issues. To be clear, these are not Microsoft employees, and this is not an official support channel, but it has been ranked one of the most active (and effective) forums on Microsoft.com. We monitor all the forum postings, and are consistently pleased with the quality of content there. So, if you’ve got a unique technical problem that requires support, please go to the help center. If you’d like to make a general comment on OneCare – or say something specifically to me or other guest bloggers – please post your comment on the blog. If you are looking for community assistance on a topic area, or want advice from someone that may have a targeted answer to your question, please try the forum.

Thanks for your comments across all the different channels – we really do appreciate it. And in the interest of responding to blog feedback, I will be posting a general “round-up” in the next week or two to address some of the more common questions and comments on the blog. Also look for some additional postings as we head toward availability of our next major release (v1.5) at the end of January.

Kind regards,

Yoav