Microsoft Live Mesh Preview

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Microsoft Live Mesh Preview

Jun 3rd

Posted by Tyler

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Tagged: Microsoft in General

This post was published 1 year 5 months 26 days ago which may make its actuality or expire date not be valid anymore. This site is not responsible for any misunderstanding.

Hey everyone, first article here, glad to be on the team.

And for my first article, I’d like to talk a little bit about a current beta software from Microsoft, and part of the Live family of products. It’s called Live Mesh, and is Microsoft’s attempt at unifying your very decentralized life.

Ok so you may be asking why I’m wasting your time with this software if it’s not directly related to Mobile…well it isn’t….yet. Microsoft’s eventual goal with Live Mesh is to unify your life across platforms, hardware, and even location. If you have an internet connection, Microsoft wants to connect you. And this doesn’t just mean Windows Vista based machines, Microsoft has support for Windows XP as well as planned support for Mac and, you guessed it, mobile smartphones (presumably Windows Mobile based devices, at least to start out).

Continue Reading After the Break!

How many times have you been at your office, or possibly on a business trip when a peer of yours wants to see a specific file, but it happens to be on your desktop at home, your media center, etc. Well normally you’d do something ornate and complex like have a VPN tunnel to a home server which synchronized all your files across devices every night, yada yada yada.

Well with Live Mesh, the whole process is instantly simplified. Just install the client. You can then pick up to 5GB of files to put on Microsoft’s servers (I don’t think this uses your SkyDrive or Hotmail quota either) and will automatically be sync’ed to the servers in your PCs idle time.

Also very impressive, is that you can add access to your files for other users (colleagues, clients, other students, etc), which will be great for collaboration. Microsoft may have just stumbled upon the holy grail that is sharing files between different users on different machines over the internet (well, sharing files with certain people and with certain permissions, as well as keeping it all organized and updated).

Eventually, Microsoft plans to be able to access hard drives from their AJAX web interface (the effects of which are impressive, I had to do several double takes to assure myself I wasn’t using a Flash or Silverlight application) so you can gain access to your files from anywhere. The obvious shortcoming is that the device has to be on, which makes it invaluable that they give you the 5GB of storage space (hopefully with the ability to purchase more in the future).

But, most impressively, this functionality not only extends to files on desktop/laptop machines, but also to mobile in the future. There may be a time quickly coming where we don’t need to ever hook our smartphones with cables (except for charging of course), just queue up the files and information you wish to sync, and it will be pushed to Microsoft’s servers, then polled later on.

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But what else does Microsoft have to bring to the table? Remember Remote Desktop? Remember how much of a pain it is to use with NAT-redirected home networks? Well Live Mesh not only has the ability to easily allow you to connect to other PCs via remote desktop behind NAT-redirected and firewall protected networks, but it also does it via a web client (ActiveX control at the moment, there is a local client almost identical to Remote Desktop Client in the Live Mesh local program).

This allows you to pull up to any PC that can run ActiveX controls and access your home PC or any other PC that you have running the Live Mesh software. Also, in future times, you’ll be able to access Macs too, possibly even more clients (though I wouldn’t be holding my breath for a Linux client any time soon, sorry guys).

Possibly there’s even hope for being able to access desktop machines from your smartphone, but I can’t guarantee that.

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For those of us that don’t spend every waking moment in front of our primary machines, or have multiple primary machines, I think this product speaks for itself, especially for those that don’t have a cronjob setup to rsync our files between machines over an OpenVPN connection at 3am every morning.

And if you’re worried about security, don’t worry, Microsoft has us covered with 128-bit AES (using RSA keys) encryption, which is the same algorithm that the NSA approved for usage on top secret US Government documents.

I currently am a member of the Tech Preview beta, and will be writing more on this later as more of the features are pushed out. Right now it already rocks but it hasn’t quite taken over my entire computing experience…yet, but I’ll surely be following up on this later.

More Information:
Live Mesh (Official Website)
Live Mesh Blog
Live Mesh on Live Dev (Introduction Article)
Live Mesh Wikipedia