Overall: 4 out of 5

Highs: easy to use, good single page scanner/ocr solution, awesome tech support

Lows: installation issues for non-default installation, a bit slow to start up

I have been wanting a solution for organizing my receipts, reference documents, business cards for quite some time.  Enter NeatReceipts.  It is a good product and their tech support (which I hope that you won’t need) is awesome!  The optical character recognition (ocr) is good and the receipt scanning works well.  The user interface (UI) leaves a little to be desired in terms of looks (a personal problem – I don’t like grid-heavy UIs that much), but it is quite functional and snappy/generally responsive.

My biggest issue was that I did a non-standard installation and tried to install their software (latest version as of Jan. 12, 2009) on a drive that was different than my Windows installation.  What a mistake that was!  After wasting a couple of hours trying to get that installation to work, I finally mentioned that crucial detail to the tech support person with whom I was instant messaging and they quickly told me to conform and install on the same drive as my Windows installation.  With that new tidbit of information, the installation went off without a hitch.  One other issue that I ran into was a synchronization one related to Outlook.  I had scanned in a business card and sync’d with Outlook.  I realized that the contact info had been Optically Character Recognized (ocr’d) incorrectly.  I corrected the mistake (which I should have caught earlier) and re-sync’d.  For some reason my Outlook information got overwritten by the info from NeatReceipts.  Being a stubborn fool, I decided to try it again.  I updated the info in Outlook and then re-sync’d.  It worked this time.  Hmmmm… Ok.  I was a bit concerned about the sync at that point, but all seems to be well so far.  Also, the program is a bit slow to start, but then it is snappy, so I appreciate that trade-off.

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!).

Overall: 4 out of 5

Highs: protects 3 computers, great price, low resource utilization

Lows: VPN configuration required, requires Auto Updates to be installed automatically or goes red

When I upgraded to Vista, I was looking to find a product for a fancy firewall (my favorite firewall company was purchased and their product has taken a wrong turn) and an anti-virus that didn't use too many resources (tried a few and they were too invasive).  Enter Microsoft Windows Live OneCare.  I tried the demo and once it expired, I immediately purchased the product.  It just sits there and does its job quietly and uses a minimal amount of system resources.  I like it because I rarely notice it and it gives me quite a few firewall options.  Did I mention that my subscription covers three (3) computers?  Pretty cool.  However, there is always room for improvement.  Here are a few suggestions:

1. If a network zone is set as "Home or Work," the firewall should allow VPN connections.  By default, the firewall doesn't allow this, so you have to change it on every computer.  Not sure what the security issue is to not allow outbound VPN traffic, but I assume that there is some security best practice of which I am unaware.
2. If I don't want to automatically install updates, OneCare goes red and constantly reminds me that I am unprotected.  That is fine; I just wish that I could turn off that message and make it green/orange again since I want to know what is getting installed before it gets installed.  For now I just install everything that is critical and hope my machine doesn't get hosed.  Which reminds me...  I better get that backup working sooner rather than later.

Overall a great product.  I will gladly continue my subscription until something much better comes across my desktop.