November 21, 2008 - 11:53, by Dostalek, Kevin
Last month I posted about the
Foldershare Beta which solved a big problem for me, as well as doing it in a very simple yet robust way. I knew then that it was using Microsoft's Mesh Framework, but I had no idea what that was.
Now after attending the MS PDC, I know exactly what the Mesh Framework is, as well as Live Services, and the whole Windows Azure platform (ok, well that last one is still blurry for me). And for those that were just assuming that all of this stuff was 2+ years off from reality, it's not.
I just received an email from the Windows Live FolderShare group letting me know that "In December, we plan to announce a product called Windows Live Sync. You can think of it as FolderShare 2.0." Some of the new features they are promising are:
- More folders and files - sync up to 20 folders with 20k files each.
- Integration with Live ID
- Integration with the Recycle Bin
- Unicode support - sync files in other languages
So this represents one of the first real big product releases on top of the some of these new platforms (ok, granted, some have been out for awhile, like Live Messenger and the other Live stuff)-- but this is a real Meshified app. I'll be interested to see how our apps that are also Meshified will be able to integrate with Live Sync.
I am a little confused though since Live SkyDrive doesn't look like it's going to be replaced by Live Sync (although certainly it could)... in fact I saw rumors that SkyDrive's were going to be upgraded to 25GB in the near future!
Last word of warning from the email I received. During the upgrade from FolderShare to Live Sync, it will automatically rebuild all your personal folders and device relationships. However, it will not rebuild your shared libraries. So if you have some, you should copy all of that information to some local storage pronto to make sure you don't lost it.
I'll post an announcement and review here when Live Sync goes live next month!