I just started using Microsoft Live Mesh after hearing about it from Joe Shirey. For those not familiar with Live Mesh, you can read more here, here, and here.
I have to say that overall I am very impressed with the promise of these services from Microsoft.
That said, the user experience leaves something to be desired. I will do a more thorough review once I have been using it for a few months to give people a better feel for what Mesh is doing. I also hope to have some time to be able to play with the Developer SDK, but that is probably wishful thinking =]
I am using Vista with UAC and Microsoft One Care. Here are the few issues that I ran into when installing and synchronizing my first folder:
Installation
- I had to turn off my Microsoft One Care firewall as the firewall wasn't allowing Mesh to install properly. I even tried to allow the application access to the Internet, but the initial wait time for the firewall dialog and the UAC killed the installer even when I tried to run it again. Tried this a couple times. Had to just turn off the firewall and then re-run the installer.
- Mesh takes forever to start up immediately after installing. I have a reasonably fast machine and it took a few minutes, so I wasn't sure if the installation was successful or if the firewall had screwed things up. A dialog letting me know that it would take a while would be nice. Microsoft is generally good about these things, so I imagine this level of usability is at the end of the list of things to do.
General Usability
- There are few/no cancel buttons on some of the dialogs. I just had to wait for the web operation to time out (which took like a minute or two). I had a modal dialog on my screen with no way to do anything to it.
- Mesh takes a while to get going. Again, more feedback would be nice.
- Mesh doesn't provide detailed messages in terms of what has been synchronized. It just tells you X folders and Y files were uploaded. A little more detail (although hidden from the default UI) would be nice.
Overall, I think this technology has great promise, and I look forward to other good software+ services from Microsoft (the Microsoft marketing people are in my head and I can't get them out!).