live mesh tech preview

I finally got my invite for Microsoft’s Live Mesh today. Spent some time playing with it tonight. On the surface, it looks to be.. lacking. I really didn’t look into the ins and outs of Live Mesh before trying to get an invite. I knew it had something to do with their Sync Framework and I was making the assumption that it was a enhanced up version of FolderShare (which I’m a huge fan of). Well I was partly right. There definitely is the functionality to just sync up folders (although it wasn’t a clear as I thought it would be).

 

Once you get an invite and sign in you get into your Live Mesh Desktop. This should be thought of like the normal desktop we’ve come to know and love (with way less icons, misc word docs strewn about. oh and the wallpaper on my desktop is cooler).  Right now you can create a new Mesh Folder.  A mesh folder is basically just a folder that can by synced onto any other Mesh Device (gee, this sounds just like FolderShare). It does appear that the files are actually stored up on Microsoft’s servers “in the cloud”, which is more like SkyDrive. So now its looking like Mesh is a FolderShare/SkyDrive hybrid. I also use SkyDrive, so it looks like Mesh might be able to help consolidate some of the services I use. When you open up the folder you created on mesh, you get a Vista-like explorer view of the folder.

(hey look.. my first screenshot!)

 

My first time creating a new Mesh Folder I didn’t click on the horizontal chevron. If you do that you can set what devices sync and when. Since I didn’t do that I had to figure out how to get the folder to sync to my desktop. Here’s a screenshot of what you get if you click the chevron to expand out the Synchronization Options

Although this window looks like its a Vista window, its all running within IE as a modal window “on my Mesh Desktop”.

Since I didn’t do that the first time, I had to stumble around until I found out how to sync my mesh folder with my desktop (and I’ve already forgotten where I did that at).

I do see that after you install the Mesh client it creates a Live Mesh Folders in your profile space. In my case since I’m running vista this is C:\Users\Steve\Live Mesh Folders.

 

Ok. I figured out what you have to do to configure the client to sync… wait. you have to wait for it to show up in the active folders view on the Mesh client notification window.

Just click on the folder icon (that thing that looks like it was circled by a left-handed pre-school student…wait, I am left handed)

Once you click on the “New Folder” you can configure where you want it to sync to (on the local machine).

 

Well that sure was a lot about the whole sharing files part… in fact way more than is probably required. Outside of the suped up FolderShare/SkyDrive-esk feature, what do I like about Live Mesh

• Remote Desktop – Although I haven’t tried this yet, it looks like it will allow you to make a remote desktop connect from anywhere to a device running the mesh client. Kind of nice, not sure how much I’d use it…. well, outside of troubleshooting problems on someone’s computer.
• You can use the foldersharing as a collaboration mechanism. The alert/news feature tells you when something has been added/updated in a folder.
• Although I haven’t found any apps (or demo apps we can play with) that leverage Mesh, based on this quick demo you can see there’s a lot more to Mesh than what we’re seeing as end users. As I mentioned at the beginning, right now Live Mesh looks rather empty. But as you can see from the demo, that’s because Live Mesh is a platform, not a product.  You can see it has Google Gears type functionality, allowing you to take web apps offline.

In short, this thing has some potential. It’ll be interesting to see how it fits in with the cornucopia of “web 2.0″ services already out there. (not just in general, I also mean personally… I’m already at at least 15 different “web 2.0″ sites/services)

 

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