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The history of Windows Live Mesh

2010-09-01 10:28
You mightв ve heard that Microsoft recently decided to rebrand Windows Live Sync to Windows Live Mesh. But what was the story behind this great file synchronisation tool Weв ll give you a brief summary of the history behind Windows Live Mesh, right from the very beginning. It all started in 2005, three days after Microsoft introduced the Windows Live brand on November 1st, 2005, when they announced an acquisition to purchase 160;FolderShare from ByteTaxi Inc, a software which allowed PC-to-PC sync of files and folders over the internet, and also enabled users to remotely access their files from the PCs under the sync relationship. But things didnв t change for almost three years, and for those users who were already using FolderShare, life went on. During these three years, Microsoft had been busy rewriting the entire FolderShare backend sync platform, moving it from LAMP to Windows Server. It wasnв t until March 2008 when Microsoft finally came out of the limelight to release Windows Live FolderShare, the first version under the Windows Live branding which was completely rewritten to make it run on the new Windows Server platform. In the same year in April 2008, Microsoft also announced an incubation project called Live Mesh, headed by Ray Ozzie. Live Mesh was a new vision for Microsoft, based on FeedSync technology, and was even once envisioned to be the cloud OS from Microsoft. Indeed, besides PC-to-PC sync plus PC-to-Cloud sync (with 5GB of cloud storage), 160; Live Mesh also had a whole developer API behind it called the Live Framework. The Live Framework enabled developers to create applications to be run on the Live Mesh Platform, which could be synced between the devices as well as on the cloud. This meant that users will be able to use the same application, with the same underlying data, synced across all their devices with Live Mesh installed, as well as Live Desktop using the web browser. In October 2008, with the announcement of Microsoftв s cloud strategy, Live Framework also became part of the Azure Service Platform. With Live Mesh, Microsoft was ambitious - not only it supported Windows PCs, but it also had clients for Mac OS X and Windows Mobile 6. Weв ve even seen Live Mesh running on Windows Home Server, Xbox, Zune, Ford SYNC, and using it to sync data between printers, digital cameras, and digital photo frames. The potential seems limitless with Live Mesh. Of course, with Live Mesh, it would seem that Windows Live FolderShare was far more inferior in doing the same job. However, Microsoft continued to support both platforms, and in December 2008, Microsoft released Windows Live Wave 3 , and together with that, they decided to rename Windows Live FolderShare to Windows Live Sync, and included it as part of Essentials. Not much changes were made to Windows Live Sync, except that it became the syncing agent behind Windows Live Toolbar and Photo Gallery in the Wave 3 era. Live Mesh actually never made it out of beta (it began as...
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