The Windows Live Calendar Team have been rolling out an update to the Windows Live Calendar Beta today and have recently blogged about what users will find within the update. I am a very heavy Windows Live Calendar user currently so this is a very exciting release for me.  I figured I'd go down their list of changes / improvements / new features with a little context of my own based on my own experiences. Here we go!

Birthday Calendars: Any Windows Live Contacts that have their birthday entered in their Windows Live Profile (you can make sure you have your birthday added to your profile by going here) will have their birthday appear in a new calendar for you called "Birthday Calendar". This allows you to keep track of all your friend's birthdays. Never forget a birthday again!

iCal Subscriptions: You can now subscribe to public calendars (*.ics calendars) in Windows Live Calendar. A great resource for public calendars is http://www.icalshare.com/ (although at the time of writing this post I was having some issues with their website). I am a Space buff so I went and grabbed the calendar for astronomical events and subscribed to it.

Once you subscribe to these calendars - as long as the publisher continues to update them they will automatically update in Windows Live Calendar. If anyone has any other useful iCal resources on the web for free calendars to subscribe to, let me know!

UPDATE: Some calendars available on www.icalshare.com have URLs that direct to a different location. Windows Live Calendar Beta does not yet support following redirects. However if you are able to determine where the URL redirects to - you can always subscribe to its "final destination".

Holiday Calendar: A new calendar will show up (depending on which part of the world you're from) that will display holidays for your country. I find this incredibly useful. Currently users in the following countries will see a Holiday Calendar:

• China
• Taiwan
• Hong Kong
• Thailand
• Singapore
• Malaysia
• Korea
• Indonesia
• Philippines
• India
• Russia
• France
• United States
• Spain
• German
• United Kingdom

UI Changes: Notably - users can now right-click on a specific calendar in their calendar list and change its color and also its order in that list.

Print Views: You are now able to print from the day, week, and month views. I prefer printing from the Month view myself. You can also print your Agenda as well. I am noticing I am using the Agenda tab quite often these days.

A few more notable changes to Windows Live Calendar Beta with this release are accessibility functionality which includes better tabbing (and F6 key support). And users can now go directly to Windows Live Calendar via the calendar tab in Windows Live Hotmail.

Want to test out subscribing to a calendar? I've shared out my Windows Experience Blog calendar to anyone interested in subscribing:

webcal://windowsexperience.calendar.live.com/calendar/The+Windows+Experience+Calendar/calendar.ics

Not a whole bunch of events there just yet. You'll find I've added today's Windows Live Calendar Beta update as an event and in October you should see events for the PDC2008 Pre-Conference and PDC2008 as well. I definitely plan on updating it. If you have any suggestions for events that would be of interest to the Windows community - leave a comment!

If you're attending PDC2008 you can also subscribe to their calendar they publish as well to add a separate PDC2008 calendar to Windows Live Calendar:

http://www.microsoftpdc.com/Microsoft-PDC08.ics

REMEMBER: You can also subscribe your calendars in Windows Calendar in Windows Vista as well!

Yesterday, along with the launch of the new Windows Live apps and services, Microsoft also commenced with the public beta of Windows Live Calendar . Denise Ho, Lead Program Manager for Windows Live Calendar, made the announcement off of the Windows Live Read More……(read more)

Yesterday, along with the launch of the new Windows Live apps and services, Microsoft also commenced with the public beta of Windows Live Calendar. Denise Ho, Lead Program Manager for Windows Live Calendar, made the announcement off of the Windows Live Hotmail blog.

Windows Live Calendar is designed to make it easier to share your plans with friends and family. Using Windows Live Calendar, you can share your calendar out to people in your Windows Live Contacts. For those of them using Windows Live Calendar, they can accept an invite to view your shared calendar which will then appear in their account when they log in to Windows Live Calendar. For friends who don’t have Windows Live ID’s - you can send them a secret link to view your calendar without the need to sign in. You can read Denise’s post mentioned above for the complete lowdown on what Windows Live Calendar offers.

But I’d like to call out a specific scenario that Windows Live Calendar supports - something I’ve adopted myself. Windows Live Calendar allows you to share out your calendar in .ics format. By doing this, it allows folks to then subscribe to their calendars in a calendar client on the PC - such as Windows Calendar in Windows Vista. Any event I add, or others add, to my calendars I’ve shared out - automatically get synced back to my PC in Windows Calendar. This also includes reminder schedules.

If I have a reminder for an event set for 1 day or 1 hour - Windows Calendar will get that and remind me (Windows Live Calendar leverages Windows Live Alerts as well for reminding users of events too).

I’ve created a video demo on showing how to set up and share out a calendar in Windows Live Calendar and subscribing to it in Windows Calendar in Windows Vista:

Video: Demo: Windows Live Calendar (BETA) #1

Sharing a calendar in Windows Live Calendar is really easy, and subscribing to it via Windows Calendar is just as easy.

Please take note: in order to take advantage of having reminders in Windows Calendar, be sure you have reminders checked for the calendar in Windows Calendar!

This scenario also works with Microsoft Office Outlook 2007 in which once you share out the .ics file (same way shown above) of a specific calendar in Windows Live Calendar, you can then subscribe to it in Outlook 2007. This will work well for those at work using Outlook 2007 and wanting to keep track of personal events in Windows Live Calendar.

Give Windows Live Calendar a try. I’ll be following up with this post with a few other posts on Windows Live Calendar in the near future.