Windows Live Mesh: Get your Data on any PC from any Device

Microsoft has just begun a new service called Live Mesh which is receiving a lot of positive buzz online. Read on to find out exactly what Live Mesh is and also to find out how to get an invitation to get in!

What is Live Mesh?

Windows Live Mesh is a powerful service which combines cloud computing and online storage with file synchronisation and remote desktop access. Potentially a wide variety of devices will be supported such as Macs and mobile phones. So you can access and synchronize your files between several computers and mobile devices.

In essence this means that any file added to the ‘mesh’ can be accessed by, transferred to and modified by any device on the mesh.

Why would I need it?

Live Mesh is incredibly easy to use and yet is extremely powerful. I’ve only been using it for a few days now but it has already become a must-have application for me. Even if you haven’t really been a big user of online storage or synchronisation in the past you should give it a try.

Live Mesh is currently made up of an online desktop and a downloadable application. This component adds options to your Windows context menus, enables you to have folders on your computer that directly sync to your online desktop. it also puts an icon into the task bar from where you can view data transfers, members, devices and folders.

How can I get it?

This is the difficult part.

The problem is that Live Mesh was released to only 10,000 testers as part of the initial pre-beta tech preview which means most of us missed out. Signing up to the Microsoft website is useless as, who knows when, if ever, you will receive an invitation.

Luckily there is another way.

If you already have an invitation then you are able to invite 2 more people to share folders with you. Once you have been invited to share a folder, you can then create your own Mesh account.

After this news was broken on LiveSide , Long Zheng, istartedsomething blogger, quickly created a website called Share Live Mesh :

As soon as I got my own invite, I started thinking of the original “Gmail invite sharing” website and began to build one for Live Mesh. Thus, www.sharemesh.com was born. If you would like a Live Mesh invite or have one to share, I encourage you to check it out.

In case you were wondering, this only took me roughly seven hours from to design, develop, test and deploy using PHP and MySQL. I owe most of it to Dreamweaver and Uniform Server .

Last night there were about 60 people registered when I signed up. The next morning there where 550 and I already had an invitation. Just make sure once you get an invitation you share the love around by inviting a couple of other people on the list.

For more Live Mesh information go to LiveSide.net , If you have trouble installing Live Mesh on a non-US computer Long Zheng provides a quick guide here .

Also note: You cannot install Live Mesh in an elevated Administrator account or with UAC turned off. Even after Mesh is installed you will need UAC activated to run it.

(By) Laurence John finds himself way over his head on the Internet. Too many places, too much people. But that’s okay, being a Uni student he already has too much time on his hands. He has begun his blog: Not Waving But Drowning …

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