Mark Wong and Erren Lester, two PMs on my team, wrote on our team blog moments ago about the new multi-user support on our Windows Live ID sign-in page.

The multi-user support is enabled by our “Windows Live Sign-in Assistant”  which is our IE browser add-on that is optionally installed with Windows Live smart clients like Live Messenger.

Do you have multiple Windows Live ID accounts? Do you the same Windows account with more than one person?  Do you switch between these accounts frequently?  If you answered yes to these questions, you’re in for some good news!

Today we are shipping the Windows Live Sign-in Assistant which is an Internet Explorer add-on that comes included with Windows Live Smart Clients, such as Windows Live Messenger. The goal of this add-on is to help make your sign-in experience faster and more convenient for users that have more than one Windows Live ID account.

Easily choose which account you want to use

Multiple Windows Live ID accounts are often used on a particular computer, either because multiple people share a computer (like in a family home), or, because you are an individual user with multiple accounts (for example, separate accounts for ‘work’ and ‘home’).   A key feature that Windows Live ID sign-in experience will offer is the ability for our users to save multiple credentials on their machine.   These multiple accounts will be shown as a list on the sign-in page – you’re even able to save your password for each of these accounts, eliminating the need to re-type your password everytime you want to change your identity!  (Note: if you use a shared/public computer, we do not recommend saving your password) Take a look at this screenshot taken from one of our test environments:
(click to enlarge): 

True Password Persistence!

Before the Windows Live Sign-in Assistant, the ‘save my password’ option caused your sign-in state to be persisted across multiple browser sessions (it was a persistent cookie), but hitting “sign-out” at any page would delete the cookie and the next time you wanted to log in, you were prompted for your password again. 

This was a frustrating experience for users.

With the Sign-in Assistant installed, the ‘save my password’ box will work just like it does in Messenger – it will keep the password in a local credential store (we use the Windows Credential Manager). If you’ve chosen to save your password, all it takes to sign in is a single click on the appropriate user tile. This is a huge improvement over the previous experience.  We’ve also made it very easy for you to remove your saved password, just click on “remove” link and the member name and password are deleted from the credential store.  You are in still in control of when your credentials are saved.
 

One credential list shared by Windows Live smart clients and browser applications

The list of users that is shown on the sign-in page is actually the same saved user list used by Windows Live desktop applications, meaning that if you save a credential in Windows Live Messenger, it will be shown by your browser on the Windows Live ID sign-in page!  If you choose to “save my password” on the Windows Live sign-in page, your username and password will show up on the user list in Windows Live Messenger.  This will unify the experience across Windows Live ID enabled applications.  This also means that choosing “remove” on the Windows Live Sign-in page will remove the saved ID/password for all

<continued on our team blog….>