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Posted January 26, 2009

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Cloud Computing Part Three: Live Mesh

Cloud Computing

cloud computing windows live meshAll cloud computing means is instead of working with files and folders stored on your hard drive, you're working on files and folders stored on servers that you access with your Web browser.

Cloud computing is the latest buzz phrase. All cloud computing means is instead of working with files and folders stored on your hard drive, you're working on files and folders stored on servers that you access with your Web browser. Google Docs is a good example of a cloud computing platform. You can sign up for Google Docs and Google will give you space on their servers for free where you can store and edit documents like text files and spreadsheets etc. Cloud ComputingGoogle has been offering this free Cloud computing service since February 2007. Microsoft has decided that the future of computing is in the cloud and so they too have recently introduced a number of free to use cloud based platforms. I've written about two of them in previous posts. One is called Windows SkyDrive and the other is called Windows Live Sync. Even more recently, Microsoft has introduced a more ambitious cloud computing platform called Windows Live Mesh.

Signing Up for Live Mesh

When you sign up for Windows Live Mesh you will be given the ability to use Windows Live Mesh's Remote Desktop to connect, synchronize and otherwise interact with all of the devices that you place in your Mesh. These devices can be PC's, Macs and Windows Mobile devices. How Live Mesh WorksSoon Microsoft will add the ability to allow you to add any kind of mobile device to your Mesh. Data and programs from any of the devices in your Mesh are available to you regardless of where you are as long as you have an Internet connection. For now, Microsoft gives you five gigabytes of free storage space. That means that you have enough room to store hundreds of large files on Microsoft's servers. All you have do to access these files is to log-in to your account with your email address and password. You can work with any of those hundreds of files with any computer with Internet access anywhere in the world. And when you get back to your home computer or your work computer, those files will reflect the changes you made to them at your remote location. Using Windows Live Mesh's Remote Desktop is a great way get work done even when you're far away from your office computer.

You don't have to install any software on your computer/computers to check out Live Mesh and sort of get a fill for it. But to get the full benefits of Live Mesh, you need to install the Live Mesh software on the devices you join to your mesh. The software that you download from Microsoft is called the Mesh Operating Environment or MOE. So once you install it, you'll need to make sure that your firewall will give MOE Internet access. But again, you don't have to install any software to set up a Live Mesh account and begin using the Live Desktop. Here's a link to get you started. And you can click here to read an article in Wikipedia about Windows Live Mesh.

Live Desktop

Even if you don't have any other devices joined to the mesh, you can still sign up for Windows Live Mesh and use your Live Desktop. You can create folders on your Live Desktop, which resides not on one of your mesh-connected devices but "in the cloud" on Microsoft servers. Windows Mesh Live DesktopAs you can see in the illustration above, Live Desktop shows up as another device in your mesh. (The photo just to the left of this text is a screen shot of Live Desktop.) You can up-load folders to your Live Desktop. You can create new folders there and move files around in these various folders just like you might do on your regular Mac or PC desktop. One thing that confused me for minute or two when I first experimented with Live Desktop is that, unlike most things in a browser environment, you have to double click a folder to open it. A single click merely selects it. Live Desktop is an excellent place to store your most important folders. While it shouldn't be your primary backup strategy, it's comforting to know that your most valuable files are stored safely in folders on Microsoft servers. Your hard drive might die at any moment but Microsoft isn't likely to be going out of business any time soon.

Sharing Live Mesh Folders

You can invite other people to share some or all of your Live Mesh folders. Files in the shared folders are automatically synchronized across both your computers and their computers, so that everyone has the same, latest version of each file. Sharing Live Mesh FoldersYou can update documents, add comments, and even send instant messages from within a shared folder. Of course, those people with whom you want to share folders must have Live Mesh installed on their computers. What's more, Live Mesh has "Presence" Technology. That means that the Live Mesh Bar, seen on the right side of this image, shows you whether the other people who share your folders are online or offline by integrating status information from Windows Live Messenger. It also shows you when other members are viewing or editing the content. You can keep up with what your "meshed" contacts are doing (such as making changes to a folder or adding comments) by using the News view in the Live Mesh Bar as shown here.

Live Remote Desktop

The nomenclature that Microsoft chose to use is sort of confusing but Live Remote Desktop is very different from Live Desktop. With the Live Mesh Remote Desktop feature, you can connect to other computers in your mesh, view their desktops, run their programs and even work with their files and folders in their Windows Explorer right there on your computer. You could even ask and be given control of a friends computer who is a member of your Mesh. If she or he is using the computer at the time of your request to take control of it, the person sitting at it will be prompted to allow or deny the connection. While you're connected to the remote device with Live Mesh, the desktop is still visible to anyone who's sitting at the remote computer and both of you can control the desktop. Any task performed by either person will show up simultaneously on the desktop both to the person sitting there locally and to the one controlling the desktop remotely. I recently tried this out with a friend of mine who is connected to my Mesh and I had very little trouble controlling her computer from mine. The mouse actions were a little sluggish and the wait time for responses were a little slow. Otherwise, everything worked flawlessly. It was pretty awesome.

The Future of Cloud Computing

If you've read all of this carefully and you've also read my previous post called Windows SkyDrive and another called Windows Live Sync, you've realized that Windows Live Mesh can do everything that these other Windows platforms can do and more. I don't know why Microsoft offers all three of these free cloud-platform programs independently of each other. But I'm glad they do.

Microsoft would probably have liked to have seen a future in computing where people using computers stayed on their Desktops using Microsoft's expensive Operating System software. Cloud ComputingThey would probably much preferred that most of us only used the cloud to Google this or that and look around for entertaining videos. Unfortunately for Microsoft and fortunately for all of us who use computers, that's not going to be the case in the future. The future for computer users will be in the cloud. Very soon all of the space on our hard drives will be taken up by music, movies and other huge files and all of the work we do with our computers will be done in the cloud. Microsoft knows this. They know they a competing with Google for dominance in the cloud and that is why they are offering Live Mesh to us for free

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cloud computing windows live meshQuestions? Comments? Did I get something wrong? Email me at sjh@scoroncocolo.com and I WILL get back to you.

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