Welcome to Beta
Hello,
Abhay Parasnis here, General Manager for Live Mesh. Today is a big day for Live Mesh, but before going into details, I want to thank all the existing users of our Live Mesh technology preview. We REALLY appreciate the great suggestions and enthusiasm so many of you have provided. Hopefully you have seen how your input has influenced the evolution of the offering. Our announcement today should provide another example…
We are delighted to announce that Live Mesh is going into open Beta over the course of this week and includes several new features (see below) that enhance the experience by giving users more control, increased reliability, and improved performance. With all the PDC news it’s also worth restating what exactly Live Mesh is. Live Mesh is an experience that is natively integrated with the Live Services component of the Azure Services Platform – it makes the core functionality of Live Services available to end users.
Our efforts with Live Mesh arise from the two dominant trends in the industry today where the web is more and more central to our digital lives, and where we are adopting a wider diversity of increasingly powerful devices. As we take advantage of this new digital world, our experiences often become fractured and complex. We create and accumulate massive amounts of data, and the information and applications we care about reside on different devices and are spread across the web. We also interact with a broader array of people, struggling to stay connected with them and informed of the latest happenings. Users want, and increasingly, demand a seamless “just works” computing experience that brings together their devices, their data, their applications, and the people they interact with.
Live Mesh provides downloadable software for PC’s and a service on the Web that extends the Windows experience for seamless synchronization of files (photos, documents, etc) and apps, across devices, and enables easy sharing with people – concepts we focus on in our mantra of ‘data, devices, people, and applications’.
Back in April when we did the initial tech preview release of Live Mesh we emphasized a vision for how the offering would bring together your world of devices – a starting point to deliver on the data, devices, and people aspects of our vision. With this beta release we are making another significant step toward this goal. In particular… with this Beta we are providing limited availability of our new Mac and Windows Mobile 6 clients – providing users with a wider range of devices that can participate in their mesh. Later this week as the beta rolls out, access to the Mac client will be provided from the device ring experience at www.mesh.com. Instructions for accessing the Windows Mobile client will be made available at this blog later in the week.
When we did the initial tech preview release we also emphasized how the underlying platform would be made available to developers later in the year. We delivered on this promise with the announcement today that the Live Framework – a uniform way for utilizing all the Live Services including the mesh platform technologies – is now available as a Community Technology Preview. This CTP includes several applications we have built that are enhanced and run in the mesh. With this developer release, we are starting to realize the “applications” portion of the Mesh vision. This means that in the near future our full ecosystem of developer partners will be able to enhance their applications with mesh technologies providing even more value to our Live Mesh users. Also with our Live Services announcements, we are delivering in a bigger way against the people element by enabling developers to build applications that integrate with the more than 460 million Windows Live users. To learn more about our Live Framework CTP, please check out www.azure.com.
After this year, Live Mesh will be utilized in the next major release of Windows Live. This is the first planned integration and ship vehicle for Live Mesh, and there will be others as we continue to deliver on our overall Software-plus-Services strategy.
We hope you are as excited as we are about this milestone – thank you again for helping us evolve Live Mesh!
Live Mesh New Features include…
· Additional Live Mesh folder member roles have been enabled: Creator, Owner, Contributor, and Reader
· The option to drag and drop files to folders on Live Desktop
· The option to sync Live Mesh folders P2P only, excluding your Live Desktop, can now be enabled from the local device
· Improved Peer to Peer synchronization performance and reliability
And many more…
For more details on Live Services, check out David Treadwell's interview with Channel 9:
David Treadwell: Inside Live Services
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