I found a very cool tool last night from Microsoft (presently in open beta) called FolderShare that has solved a very basic problem for me.

 

 

Since I have many computers (4 that I personally use), keeping files in sync and available offline was a challenge.  Specifically document files, my one note files, and mind map files.  My previous solution was to use Microsoft Groove which supported a direct "folder" mode of sharing, which worked pretty well, although running Groove was pretty resource intensive.  Unfortunately, Groove doesn't support this type of folder sharing on 64bit OS'es (no idea why), and my new laptop is running Vista64.

 

So enter FolderShare.  It uses the new Microsoft Mesh infrastructure (more to come on that along with other Cloud Computing topics) and easily let's you share any folder across multiple computers.  You can even share folders with others (an outgrowth of SkyDrive), and allow remote file access to any of your computers from any internet browser (on any PC, not just yours).

 

So far I have all 4 of my PC's sync'ing about 4 folders, and they are doing it flawlessly, and pretty quick too (I believe it's using some of the BITS protocol behind the scenes, so it's sort of like a bittorrent network amongst your PC's).  It has an incredibly small footprint and appears to work behind whatever firewall configuration I throw at it.  In the future I may try and even add some of my other home PC's into the mix to get a no-management peer backup solution in place.

 

One thing to note, that the product is still in beta (but seems ready to go for me).  If you decide to try it, you'll have to create an account first, because it doesn't seem they've gotten around to integrated it with the LiveID system.