Windows Live mesh appears to be a solid move into the cloud based computing market by Microsoft.  I will give a quick intro using screenshots.  A quick overview.  Windows Live Mesh (www.mesh.com) allows you to collaborate by sharing files from your personal computers over the Internet.  It then lets you add users who can access files.  You can also share data from folders on different PCs, which get added to your mesh.  A bonus feature is that the Remote Desktop Connection is a part of your desktop and allows you to remotely control your computers after Live Mesh is installed on them.  The only thing I am missing is document editing features.  If you could somehow use Google Apps on your mesh, this would be a killer app.  As it stands though, I carry a thumb drive with maintenance software as well as the free OpenOffice.org software on it, so even if I’m on a PC with no office suite on it, as long as it runs Windows I am able to do word processing.  Also missing in the interim are drag and drop capability, and MacOS and Mobile support.

HERE ARE THE SCREENSHOTS!!!

    The nicest surprise was the fact that Remote Desktop Connection (RDC) is enabled on Mesh.  Because RDC requires the computer you are using to be on the local network and have a password on the user account you are logging into, it wasn’t as useful as it could have been.  In the Windows environment, most users aren’t using passwords and thus can’t connect via RDC, and the error message won’t really point the average user to the reason they can’t connect.  Gotta love seeing Vista inside of XP though.
  
    The notifier is installed on each computer you want in your mesh and it is added to your list of devices.  You use your list of devices to connect remotely and control a PC (by clicking the Connect to device link.

    Your Live Desktop shows as a Vista skinned window in your browser, complete with drag and drop and resizing.  Your files are shown in an explorer like window as they are synced.  The Live Desktop comes with 5 GB of file storage so while it won’t hold an mp3 or podcast collection, it will hold your documents and photos.  The only disappointment I saw was that there wasn’t a built in document editor, or photo thumbnails (as with the large icon option in Vista).  Another thing is that Mesh relies on Active X controls so you’re limited to Internet Explorer.  If you use Firefox because your Internet Explorer has fallen victom to viruses, you are out of luck.  One neat feature is that if you install Silverlight (Microsoft’s answer to flash), you are given the option of using the Media view, which is an embedded Windows Media Player for playing video files. 

The Mesh notifier which is installed in your system tray gives you a Instant Messenger-like news feed of files that have been synchronized or deleted.

    The Mesh folder view allows you to add Twitter-like messages to a feed for your shared folder.  This would be a good device to use to notify your users that you have updated a document, or removed a share.

    Mesh lets you assign users to folders and give those users permissions.  This way you can determine who sees files and who can edit them.
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   This is the interface for adding and editing users to a share.  You add them by sending an invitation to users with Live accounts.  You can chose to give them logical roles of Owner (can read, modify and write to documents), Reader (can read documents) and Contributer (can read and add their own documents, but not modify other’s documents).  Who would have thought that Hotmail account from the 90s would be a part of the future in 2008.

    Unfortunately, this is a preview, and features like the ability to drag files from your computer to your Mesh desktop aren’t available yet.

    Overall, Mesh looks promising as Microsoft tries to shift from local computing to cloud computing.  It takes your file sharing from your local LAN and makes it available worldwide for free, using a free Windows Live account.  Microsoft is supposed to be making a shift towards online services (see Microsoft Equipt).  I can see this service as a supplement to their other online services, and the eventual online adaptation of Office.  I would also like to see some kind of media sharing/streaming included, which would be similar to how Orb allows you to share your media over the internet, although the Orb really stresses a computer.  In the end this is a solid preview of the direction Ray Ozzie has Microsoft headed in.  I would also like to see how Microsoft plans on integrating its live services.  I’m not a Mac person, but I guess that it would be similar to the direction .mac is headed in.  I can see signing onto Windows Live search and having your targeted ad banner link you to a new song by your favorite artist.  You would look to a sidebar and see how many new emails you have, today’s events on your calendar, new files added to your mesh, your virus definition status, online IM users, and new stories on your RSS subscriptions.

    My only real concern is user security.  If you’re using a Windows Live account to subscribe to all of these services and put your personal data online, you’d better have a strong password to protect yourself from hacking.  You’d also have to really watch out for the first person who tries to spoof Windows Live to get you to give them your username and password through phishing.