Microsoft LiveMesh – What’s it all about – And my initial experience

As I write this, I am installing the latest web based application from Microsoft called LiveMesh onto my laptop.

I’m not sure what to realistically expect, however the marketing catch phrase from the LiveMesh site “Live Mesh puts you at the center of your digital world, seamlessly connecting you to the people, devices, programs, and information you care about—available wherever you happen to be”.

This statement instantly gets me thinking about a seamless way of storing and accessing my files from any device that I have. I suspect that I’m not unlike most people – I have a work laptop, a personal PC and a mobile phone (running Windows Mobile).

Because I spend so much of my time at work I sometimes have my personal files on my work laptop (and vice versa). One such example is my current Uni assignment (on Cryptography). I do quite a bit of work on these assignments during my lunch break, and then I save the files off to a USB thumb drive to copy over to my home PC.

I know there are other various “cloud computing” type web sites and applications around that let you store your files online, however they are a hassle to use.

The Microsoft LiveMesh experience seems to be promising more than just another online repository for your files – And a quick overview of its features it looks like it just very well might live up to its promises. These features include:
- Multiple devices synchronised with the latest content from the LiveMesh site - This could include not only your own PC’s, but family and friends PC’s that you want to share files to – For example photo’s
- The ability to access the files from the LiveMesh site directly (no matter what PC you are using) – For example at an Internet Café
- The ability to structure your LiveMesh storage using Folders. From the looks of things these folders can be replicated back to the PC
- Remote Desktop connection sharing – Now this could be pretty cool indeed

The LiveMesh application currently only supports Windows XP and Vista – It looks like future enhancements will include synchronisation capabilities to your Windows Mobile Smartphone and also Mac OS.

So – It looks like Microsoft are making some pretty big promises here – I’ve just completed the installation on my Windows Vista laptop, and I’ll also install it on my home PC (Windows XP) in the next day or so, and will let you know what transpires.

Have a good one : - )
Phil

PS - The graphics do look pretty slick – Here are a couple of snap-shots: