We are pleased to announce the release of our next update, which will be is now available later today. We’re making Live Mesh available to even more people, and removing the limit on the number of invites that you have. We’ve also greatly streamlined the sign-up process. And of course we’ve made a number of general performance improvements as well. There are more details 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.

What's new

• More capacity: We’ve again raised the limit on the total number of customers we’ll allow to access the Live Mesh Tech Preview. Get ‘em while they’re hot!
• Expanded availability: If your country/region is the United States, United Kingdom, Australia, or New Zealand you can sign up for Live Mesh directly, with no waiting list, by visiting www.mesh.com. We’re limiting the Tech Preview to these countries/regions for now because we want to make sure that all customers have a great experience with Live Mesh, and we’re still in the process of testing the experience for other countries/regions.
• More invites: There is no longer any limit on the number of invitations that Live Mesh customers have for inviting others to the Tech Preview. Invite as many people as you like! (as long as they're in one of the countries/regions mentioned above, of course.)
• Simplified waiting list: Though we’re not quite ready to accept customers into the Tech Preview from countries/regions other than the United States, United Kingdom, Australia, and New Zealand, we have greatly simplified the waiting list process for everyone else. You no longer need to sign up through Microsoft Connect. Instead, simply sign in with your Live ID on www.mesh.com, click Sign Up, and you’ll automatically be notified once Live Mesh is available in your country/region.
• Performance tuning: We’ve continued making a number of back-end performance enhancements, including tuning the P2P synchronization channel.

Windows Vista User Account Control (UAC) reminder

While we no longer require that UAC be enabled when running Live Mesh on Vista SP1, if you initially installed Live Mesh with UAC enabled, and then disabled it, you might have some issues upgrading. Please see the “NOTICE: Updating Lie Mesh and User Account Control (UAC)” Announcement on the Live Mesh forums for further information.

As always, we are continuing to improve Live Mesh with all the great feedback we’ve been receiving from our customers. Keep it coming!

We will be rolling out a tune-up for the Live Desktop later today, July 21. There will be no update to the Live Mesh software.  You may notice a slowdown in service or some display issues while the servers update.  If you are still seeing these problems after the 21st, please report them on the forums or through Microsoft Connect.

Our forum announcement from yesterday got a lot of people talking (more).  We just updated the forum post to clarify exactly what's going on, but I want to explain here as well.  This week we did two things:

1. Doubled the maximum number of users we'll allow to access the Live Mesh Technology Preview.
2. Simplified the Tech Preview sign-up process.  We've removed the requirement to sign up via Microsoft Connect, so that instead you can sign up directly from www.mesh.com.

We'll continue to listen to your feedback (keep it coming!), add features, and open up for more Live Mesh users over time.  And we'll have plenty to say to developers about the platform at PDC.

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.