I came across Windows Live Mesh a bit ago when searching for free alternatives to MobileMe (me.com) that is provided by Apple sung to the tune of $99 a year. While MobileMe is a seamingly complete and polished product that many people are very pleased with, it was out of my current tech budget of $0. I was therefore left searching the net for what I thought would be the next best thing. I then found mesh.com.
What Live Mesh does is give you 5 gigabytes of cloud storage on a server located… well who really knows where… but back to the main idea, it is free. While it may only remain free while the program remains in beta, I’ll take advantage of the opportunity while the going is still good. Mesh allows you to sync this cloud storage to, as far as I can tell, as many PCs (for now) as you see fit. *The MAC version of software is in alpha and the mobile version has yet to make an appearance.* These synced computers require you to install the Live Mesh software downloadable from mesh.com. The software makes sure all files are properly synced across all your “devices” and the storage is also accessible anywhere in the world via the mesh.com “live desktop”. So if you’re work and home computers are both synced then you can seamlessly access, modify, and store files across both computers even if one is powered down.
Also folders can be shared with other Live Mesh users that allow them to perform a multitude of different interactions with your files based on the permissions you have given them, from view-only to full modification. Microsoft is also in the process of making applications for Live Desktop that can be shared and simultaneously interacted with by other Live Mesh members to allow for collaboration on projects or to simply share a simple board game across computers. This tool holds the promise of both personal and commercial usefulness and may be Microsoft’s answer to Google’s “Wave” that will be coming out soon as well and also allows for simultaneous interaction among users.
With the other capabilities listed and out of the way we come to the most exciting (for me) and useful (also for me) feature of them all. Any device inside of your mesh that you have installed the client software on can be remote controlled and accessed at any time from either mesh.com (only with ActiveX in IE) or by another computer running the client software that is also in your mesh. You can either request remote access if the host machine is already in use (via a prompt) or if the machine is idle then you may automatically take control of the machine and even black out the local monitor output. This allows you to manipulate the machine and from the tests the remote responsiveness is extremely good from super fast connections to even broadband that is below national ISP averages.
Also the remote control portion of this online/offline hybrid also has several security features in place to prevent abuse by an outside party.1. You may only access a remote machine if that machine is already part of your mesh, so no hijacking other members PCs without their permission.
2. The remote machine is automatically sent to the windows lock screen when accessed and you must know the current LOCAL logged in user’s password to unlock the machine so you may use it.
These security features allow for unobstructive security that prevents unwanted access to your private data while not hindering your workflow and access to your own systems.
I encourage you all to check out and support mesh.com as Microsoft might have gotten it right this time around when their software and you never know who will create the next great thing in the software world!
September 05, 2009, 2:18am Comments
