Microsoft Webmaster Tool has had a recent update with some new features added to help webmasters.
Webmaster Live which is now moved out of beta, now has some additional features similar to Google Webmaster Tools. Google has been constantly updating its webmaster tool which provides much greater insight into a website once the owner authenticates their site.
The new section “Crawl Issues” provides information related to 404 errors, Blocked by REP, Long Dynamic URL and Unsupported content type. REP issues are related to the Robot Exclusion Protocol through the robots.txt file. These issues can further filtered by subdomain or subfolder level. The derived report can then be downloaded as aCSV file.
Similarly, the “Backlink” tool and other tools like “Outbound Links” now has filtering and downloading options. The listing also includes a Page Score similar to how Google ranks pages with its Page Rank.
This is a good update by Microsoft but still have a long way to go and frequent updates to compete with Google Webmaster Tools.