Another of the new Windows Live series of services officially launched the other day - It's Windows Live Custom Domains, and essentially it allows you to use the great Hotmail email services with your personal domain name.

All you have to do is go to http://domains.live.com/, specify your domain name (which you must already have registered), make a change to your DNS settings for the domain (the service will let you know what the settings are - this is the most complicated part of the whole deal), and create email accounts (which become passport logon accounts for the system).

I created a mail service for blogaholic.net (a domain which I have yet to launch, maybe someday) and added an email account, logged in and was sending mail - all in less than 10 minutes. Suhhh-lick!

Serious about Security

The service is really darn cool (seriously, if you're looking for the power and convenience of Hotmail and the uniqueness of your own domain name, it's hot), but the one thing that stood out to me the most was the client security Microsoft has built into the account setup process for this service. Yes, I know - basic security tools, blah blah... But it's become the rule more and more lately, which deserves mention. It's a terrific sign that the company is building better security - and better user tools to enable and teach effective security - into their services.

For example, when I created the greg@blogaholic.net email account, it required me (as the administrator for that email domain) to set a temporary password. In other words, if I create accounts for others (yes, just let me know), I only know the password they'll use to log into the account the first time.

Once I logged in to activate the email account and start using it, I had to provide the temporary password, and it required me to choose a new one and confirm it. But even better than that, as I typed the new password, a color-coded "password strength" bar showed me the complexity strength of my password. It went from Red (weak) to Yellow (so-so) to Green (strong) as I typed. Nice! That's what we need more of - simple, powerful tools to help end users be more secure in real time. Great work, whoever decided to put that in, and to whoever built it. It's quite effective.

[UPDATE: Apparently this is a feature that shipped earlier this year and was included in the LCD package and which was PM'ed by Trevin in Windows Live Identity Services - cool! Looks like I found another blog to subscribe to!]

On the same page, the user has the option to set their password to expire every 72 days. Unfortunately, that box is not checked by default (it really should be), but the fact that it's available is very good. Hopefully they'll change their tun and check that box by default, and let people un-check it of they don't want it. I'm always a proponent of more-secure-by-default.

If you want to find out more, Omar Shahine (Lead Program Manager on the HotMail front-door team) has info here and here, and the Custom Domains team has a blog here.