Service update: new build, new features coming today (0.9.3103.2)

We are delighted to announce the release of our next major update, which will be available later today is live as of now. We’ve added some new features by popular demand, as well as tuned up our performance. We’ve got the juicy details further below.  By default your Live Mesh client will automatically update itself within 24 hours of the new build being posted, but you can always right click the Notifier icon in the system tray and choose to force an immediate update.  We'll update this blog post once the update is available.

The team has also been hard at work on our developer platform. We are on track to share that work with the world at PDC ’08 (Oct 27-30 in Los Angeles.) You can see a few of our sessions on the agenda page, including “Live Platform: New Developer Services and APIs”, “Live Platform: Building Mesh Applications” and “Live Platform: Mesh Services Architecture Deep Dive”. We’ve seen a lot of interest in our platform experience – the “app” that is the face of Live Mesh today. But Live Mesh is fundamentally a developer platform, and our goal is to enable a wide range of applications that build on our relationship directory and communications and synchronization infrastructure. If you haven’t seen Ori’s Channel 9 video on the platform, take a look to see what we’re getting at.

New Features

· Sync Live Mesh folders peer-to-peer only, excluding your Live Desktop. This will make it possible to synch files across your devices (or with devices of other members of a Live Folder) without consuming any storage space or quota in the Live Mesh cloud storage service. For completeness sake, though, we should mention that it’s not a 100% P2P synch – to optimize the synch experience we still use the cloud to store the authoritative metadata for the folder (for example, the file list and change history) and to broker encrypted P2P connections between clients. But the files themselves will not be stored in the cloud. Also, note that only the creator of a Live Mesh folder will have permission to change the cloud synch settings, since all the contents of a Live Mesh folder (no matter which user uploaded them) get charged against the quota of the folder’s creator.  We've got some details on how peer communications and synch work up today on Channel 9.

· File conflicts management on the Live Desktop. Pretty much speaks for itself. The same ability to view and resolve conflicting edits to a file that you’ve had in the Windows client is now available on the Live Desktop. Actually, we think it’s an even better experience, since we took the opportunity to streamline the UX when we implemented it for Live Desktop (we’ll bring the same improvements to the client in the future.)

· Added news events for New Live Mesh folder and Delete Live Mesh folder. We’re continuing to tune the news feed to provide the right set of information you need to keep track of what’s happening across your mesh.

Fixes

· Improved performance when syncing files peer-to-peer. David and Trevor get into some of the details of where we found room for improvement in today's video.

· Better coalescing for news events. In non-geek speak, that means we’ll do a better job showing you only one news event when a user makes a bunch of changes in quick succession.

· News performance and scale improvements. Faster and better, new and improved, it slices and dices!

Windows Vista User Account Control (UAC) Update

In our last client release, we removed the requirement for UAC to be enabled when running on Vista SP1.  If you originally installed the Live Mesh software with UAC enabled, then got this update and disabled UAC, you might have some issues upgrading.  We'll have an announcement on the forum shortly with details of how to fix.

Last, a technicality for those keeping score at home -- the version number referenced in the title, 0.9.3103.2, is what you'll see in the client software.  The version number in Live Desktop will  be 0.9.3103.3, since we did a little extra work there after the client release was finalized.  Don't worry about the mismatch, this is expected and is the configuration we tested and validated before releasing.

2008-07-14 Update: Excluding Live Desktop from synching a folder is only possible from the Live Desktop itself in this release, we're working on making it an option you can control from any device in your mesh.  But for now, the steps to exclude your Live Mesh Folder from synching with Live Desktop are:

  1. Create a Live Mesh Folder
  2. If you created it from the Live Desktop
    1. Choose to synchronize it with at least one device
    2. Wait until the folder is completely synchronized on that device
  3. Go to the Live Desktop
  4. Right click on the folder and choose “Change sync settings”
  5. Click the drop down arrow for the Live Desktop and choose “Never with this device”

As mentioned above, keep in mind that only the creator of the folder can do this, and once the folder creator disables Live Desktop synch the files will not be available via Live Desktop for any other members of the folder.

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