Heads up: required update to Live Mesh coming next week
With PDC just around the corner, we will be releasing the next update to Live Mesh, and it’s a major one. In fact, this is the most significant update to Live Mesh since we opened as a technology preview back in April. We know that many of you are going to be excited to see all the new features and fixes this release will bring (and there are a lot of them, many in response to your requests.) In the spirit of openness with you, our technology preview customers, we’d like to take a little time today to talk about what the update experience is going to be like—and why.
For all the previous updates to Live Mesh that we’ve released since the tech preview began in April, customers were notified (via a little pop up above the Live Mesh notifier) that updates were available. When you were ready to update the Live Mesh software on your device, you clicked on that notification and the process began. If you chose not to update right away, though, that was okay—Live Mesh continued to work uninterrupted. With this update, however, things are going to be a little different. Specifically, all Live Mesh users will have to update their Live Mesh software to continue using the product. This time, you won’t be able to wait to update Live Mesh—in order to keep using it, you’ll have to update the software, and until you do that synchronization and Live Remote Desktop will not be available. There is a fairly straightforward reason for this: we are upgrading our software and services to support an open beta, and to handle that scale we need to get all of our existing users onto these new systems quickly. For this particular release, we are forgoing backwards compatibility in favor of making the new set of features as broadly available as possible. Once you see how much Live Mesh has grown, we think you’ll agree that this was the right tradeoff!
We hope the advance warning reduces the amount of interruption this upgrade might cause. We will, of course, let you know before we begin to actually deploy the new update—we just wanted to make sure all our valued early adopters were “in the know” right from the start.
Stay tuned for lots of Live Mesh and Live Services news from PDC over the next week, and thank you to all of you for the great feedback you’ve provided over the last six months. Live Mesh wouldn’t be where it is today without all of you!
Technorati Tags: LiveMesh