Amid the barrage of PDC announcements, Microsoft's Abhay Parasnis, general manager of Live Mesh, has announced that his team's impressive synchronisation service will be going into open beta later this week.
Live Mesh, which launched back in April, is a "software-plus-services" platform that promises to provide a seamless experience between various desktops, mobile devices and the web. Put simply, it'll synchronise your data so that your documents, pictures or whatever you need can be accessed and kept up to date on all of your devices.
The beta release will introduce a handful of new features, of which the most important are support for Mac and Windows Mobile 6 clients. At present, Live Mesh is limited to Windows desktops and the upcoming release will provide long-awaited support for Apple's computers, in addition to the following upgrades:
- Additional Live Mesh folder member roles have been enabled: Creator, Owner, Contributor, and Reader
- The option to drag and drop files to folders on Live Desktop
- The option to sync Live Mesh folders P2P only, excluding your Live Desktop, can now be enabled from the local device
- Improved Peer to Peer synchronisation performance and reliability
Speaking on the official Live Mesh blog, Parasnis adds:
After this year, Live Mesh will be utilised in the next major release of Windows Live. This is the first planned integration and ship vehicle for Live Mesh, and there will be others as we continue to deliver on our overall Software-plus-Services strategy.
That next wave of Windows Live will come in the form of the Windows Live Essentials Suite, encompassing apps such as Mail, Messenger, Photo Gallery and Movie Maker. Microsoft's Live suite of applications is still very much disjointed, but it's coming together quickly in preparation for Windows 7.
Live Mesh is available now as part of a tech preview at mesh.com, the beta release will be added later this week.
