First Impressions - Live Mesh Review

Sharing Folders Between Live Mesh Users

Score: ? of 5--Since I don't know anyone else who is using Live Mesh yet, I didn't get to try this out.

Remote Desktop Access

Score: 3 of 5--Accessing one of the devices in your mesh is very straight forward. Simply select it and click connect. I'd describe the performance accessing a remote desktop "doable"--if you aren't going to do much more than a couple of tasks on the remote computer.

Screen painting is a bit slow and mouse response can be very sluggish. But, if you just needed to log on to grab a file to add to the mesh or check some info on that remote computer, then it would be fine. I couldn't see working remotely on your remote desktop.

One thing that doesn't make sense is that the Devices view of Live Mesh lets you select the Connect button to the same device you are using. This opens a new window and then goes through the motions to connect, but results in an error message basically saying you can't remote connect to the same computer you're on.

So why enable the Connect button in the first place?. A small but helpful change would help keep things chimp simple.

User Experience

Score: 4 of 5 - Overall, Live Mesh is a very pleasant and familiar experience. The "loop" metaphor communicates well the idea these devices are synchronized and sharing files. Adding files, setting up folders and accessing them from the Windows file Explorer is easy and straight forward. The complexity is pretty minimal and the help text is very useful.

There are features you naturally expect in a desktop metaphor, like drag and drop. Microsoft's planning to implement this and tells you so in a pop-up window when you try to do a drag and drop a file. A nice touch--it's good to know they've thought about it, and that it's coming.

It is possible to get stuck down a rat hole, though. This happened to me when I clicked on my profile name in the Notes window (where it lists all the actions that have taken place.) Another click to edit my profile and I popped into the regular Windows Live interface that offers Hotmail, Spaces, OneCare and MSN.

After saving changes to my profile, I remained in Windows Live but there was no navigation to get back to my Live Mesh desktop. My option then was to re-enter the Live Mesh URL or play whack-a-mole with IE's BACK button to get past the profile edit screens and return to the Live Mesh desktop. I suspect we'll see continuity kinks like this worked out as Live Mesh gets closer to release.

Security

Score: 2 of 5 - One fundamental thing I disagree with is giving users the option to save their password. Save the user id? Well, okay, but not both user id AND password.

I especially don't want to do this with a service that I'm uploading and synchronizing my personal data with. All someone needs is physical access to a computer and the browser, and *poof* you're in. 1 demerit for saving passwords.

Now to my second issue. If I'm going to add devices to my mesh and then synchronize data across those devices, I want the ability to wipe the shared data off any of those devices that might get lost--something similar to the ability you have to wipe a PDA phone when it comes up lost.

We're not talking my friends list or my iPod playlist kind of data here. This is data that I want protected. If you remove a device from Live Mesh, it will no longer sync with the service, but it will retain the files sync'd onto the device. Add a wipe feature please. 2 demerits.

Conclusion

Like I said up front, it's a good start. Live Mesh isn't going to match up to current commercial offerings yet, but it's still very early. Flush out the rest of the basic features and you've got a solid product.

But what's really exciting to me is you can see where this is all heading. Your Live desktop will become your desktop of the future when storage, apps and content all live somewhere between your computer and parts of the cloud.

I'm particularly pleased that (Ray) Ozzie is bringing Live Mesh to us as it's built, rather than following the freeze-the-market tactics we're so used to.