Entries tagged with mesh - Channel 10

Mesh Your Bookmarks!

sarahintampa — Mon, 25 Aug 2008 05:11:00 GMT

One of the most useful things you can do with Live Mesh, beyond just syncing files and folders, is syncing your bookmarks. This is as simple as right-clicking on your Favorites folder and adding it to the Mesh. (Doug has more detailed instructions on this here). When you do this on all your machines, you’ll end up with a merged directory of all your Favorites so you can manage your bookmarks from in one location, no matter how many machines you have. How handy is that? You can even access them from any other computer that has internet access just by logging into your Live Desktop. And don’t forget that Live Mesh lets you invite others to share a folder, so, if you wanted to share your bookmarks, for example, with a team at work so everyone could contribute, you could that, too.

Live Mesh Goes Mobile

sarahintampa — Thu, 17 Jul 2008 14:50:00 GMT

Yesterday, the Live Mesh team surprised everyone by m.mesh.com to your mesh, which can then be used to move your mobile content to – for example, images and videos you took with your mobile phone. There’s also a homepage link that can be used to create a Mobile Pictures folder for you. To see a bunch of screenshots of the mobilized version of Mesh, check out LiveSide, who broke the news (img courtesy of LiveSide)

It’s Official – Live Mesh Now Open to All of U.S.

sarahintampa — Wed, 16 Jul 2008 13:11:00 GMT

Before we even had an official announcement, LiveSide was reporting last night that folks were able to sign up for Windows Live Mesh if they were located in the U.S. This morning, they confirmed this to be the case. The official announcement was made in the Live Mesh Forum. It read:

Live Mesh is now openly available to anyone in the U.S.

The Live Mesh team is pleased to announce that anyone in the U.S. can now use Live Mesh just by signing in to www.mesh.com with a valid Windows Live ID. No sign up needed to participate!

International Customers

With Live Mesh open to anyone in the US, our international friends can join in the fun early as well - with one caveat: you must be willing to change your Windows operating system region and language setting to EN-US. Once you do this you will be able to immediately sign in to Live Mesh with a valid Windows Live ID. Please be aware that this may cause other applications that specifically require your native country region and language settings to encounter problems.

Feedback

Once you've begun using Live Mesh, we'd love to hear from you! We are working hard to create the best experience and appreciate any feedback you have. Please send us feedback using our online form. You can also submit (and view others') feedback and bugs here on the Microsoft Connect website.

Thank you,
The Live Mesh team

About Live Mesh

If you haven’t checked out Mesh yet, you should. This software+services data synchronization platform isn't built with proprietary code, but rather with open protocols like HTTP, RSS, REST, ATOM and JSON. Although Mesh's FeedSync is somewhat new, it is an XML protocol based on ATOM and RSS.

With Mesh running on your computers, you can simply right-click any folder and choose "Add to Mesh." By doing so, that folder and all the files it contains are synchronized with all of your other computers you've added to your personal Mesh. It also syncs those files to the Live Mesh Desktop, which is Mesh's "cloud" - an online web site you can access from any computer. At the moment, the online storage is limited to 5 GB, but that could change in the future. However, Mesh's recent update allows you to set folders to sync via peer-to-peer, bypassing Live Desktop. When folders are Mesh-enabled, a small panel appears to the right of the folder in explorer which catalogs any changes to the folder (file adds/moves/deletions) as well as notes and comments left by any of the folder's members.

Live Mesh also lets you access all your “meshified” computers remotely, so if you have software that is installed only on one PC, you can use Live Mesh to access that computer as interact with it as if you were sitting in front of it.

Although today’s release doesn’t include a Mac version, we know that it’s under development and should be available soon.

Live Mesh Screencasts & Videos

sarahintampa — Thu, 08 May 2008 19:28:00 GMT

Steve Clayton just found some great links for those interested in Live Mesh - screencasts! Available from the "Learn More" section of the Mesh homepage, these screencasts show you how certain aspects of Live Mesh work:

In addition to screencasts, you can also find videos on Channels 9 and here on 10 about Mesh:

More on Mesh: Running the Cloud

sarahintampa — Wed, 07 May 2008 14:14:00 GMT

Now that I'm learning more about Mesh, I'm surprised at what a big undertaking it is. For example, this recent post on the Live Mesh blog talks about how they run the cloud services, which offers some interesting insights into how Mesh's "services" part of their "Software + Services" works.

In Mesh, writes Alex Mallet, a dev lead on the Live Mesh team, cloud services can be grouped into four areas:

Feed & Data Sync
Authentication & Authorization
Maintaining & Fanning out the Transient State
Connectivity Services for Sync and Remote Desktop Access

Mesh's front-end services are accessible only via HTTPS. Back-end services use HTTPS and custom protocols layered on TCP. Most services are written in C# and all services sit on top of a common runtime library.

What's really interesting though (and funny!) is when Mallet describes building the full-scale datacenter deployment and management system: he says they "chose the lazy smart route" to do so. The Mesh team used the the Autopilot framework, which is currently used by the Windows Live Search team to manage tens of thousands of datacenter machines. Mesh isn't there yet, but hopes to be!

If learning more about the services part of Mesh is the sort of thing that interests you, go ask your question in the comments section of his post.

Playing with Live Mesh: First Experiences

sarahintampa — Tue, 29 Apr 2008 16:17:00 GMT

Since I got invited to Live Mesh earlier this week, I've been playing around with the settings, adding devices, and sharing folders. It's pretty impressive how easy Mesh was to install and set up. I just downloaded and installed a small software app that runs in my system tray and then, on www.mesh.com, I added the computer I was using to Mesh.

On each PC, I picked a few folders (Documents, Downloads, and Pictures) and right-clicked on them, choosing "Add Folder to Your Live Mesh." It was that easy, I swear.

What's really cool about Mesh is that I could finally sync up my documents, photos, etc. from all my PCs to essentially merge together and become one, big, "meshed" folder. It didn't get all confused that I was syncing up a folder called Documents to another folder called Documents. It just knew what I wanted to do. After syncing, I was surprised at how much duplicate content I had, probably from having to move files to and from PCs the old fashioned way - email, USB drives, via the network, etc.

When conflicts arose, I had the option of viewing both files and choosing which one to keep. But what was really great is that the conflicts weren't displayed as annoying pop-up messages while in the middle of syncing, thank goodness - they were just items in a list that I could review at my leisure.

I'd like the option to keep both copies of some files, but, at the moment, you have to pick one to keep or just leave the conflict be. The only problem with this is that Windows Live Messenger chat logs for the same contact had the same name on different machines and I wanted to keep both logs. Other than that, I could rename documents and photos to resolve the duplicately named, but different, files, but I'm still hoping for a "keep both files" button in a future release.

When viewing a Mesh-enabled folder, a pop-up window appears next to the Windows Explorer window, showing the history of your interactions with the folder (Sarah added this, Sarah deleted that), conflicts, members, and synchronized devices.

Although Mesh is going to do much more than just this syncing in the future, for now, it's providing a great way to keep my files in sync as I move from computer to computer.

I also discovered that I could invite some friends to Mesh by sharing a folder with them, something that could be done from either a PC or my Live Mesh online desktop. If you have Live Mesh and haven't shared your invites, please do so! I know some people who are *dying* for them.

If you want to learn more about Mesh and its future, I found the article and interview by Steve Gillmor, speaking with Microsoft Mesh lead David Treadwell (who should really start blogging again) absolutely fascinating. Be warned though, this isn't the kind of article you should skim quickly. Save it for when you have some time to grab a cup of coffee, sit down, read, re-read, and really take it all in. It's worth it, I promise. If that sounds like something you would like to do in that alternative universe where you can actually sit down and read things, well then, just go get the podcast and listen to it on your commute instead.

JD, Nic, and Brian Podcast - Episode 6

brianjo — Mon, 28 Apr 2008 17:57:00 GMT

In another exciting episode of the podcast named for JD Lewin, JD, Nic, and Brian talk about Windows Vista, Live Mesh, stuff we saw on the Web, JD's sleeping habits, and the popular Asus EEE PC.

Links from today's show:

Hands on with Live Mesh

Nic — Wed, 23 Apr 2008 16:20:00 GMT

Have you ever had to email yourself a file or found that you had four different versions of the same document on four different PC's? Wouldn't it be awesome if you had a synchronized copy of all your important files on each of your devices and access to them at any time via nothing more than a web browser?
Live Mesh is a new piece of technology from Microsoft that allows you to do all this and more including a 5GB Live Desktop 'in the cloud'.
George Moromisato and Noah Edelstein from the Live Mesh team came into the Channel 10 studios and gave us a demo of the Live Mesh Technical Preview that goes live today at www.mesh.com
Watch the video to see Live Mesh in action and then let us know what you think in the comments section below.
More Live Mesh Coverage:
- Jon Udell chats with Ray Ozzie about Live Mesh
- Charles Torre talks to Abolade Gbadegesin about the Live Mesh Architecture
- Max talks Live Mesh and Students over on Channel 8