Live Mesh

We've had several posts here talking about Live Mesh as a platform, and we've said that we'll tell more of that story at our Professional Developer's Conference in October.  The session list for PDC is now mostly complete, so you can start to get a sense of what we'll have to say about our platform:

Live Platform: New Developer Services and APIs
Live Platform: Building Mesh Applications
Live Platform: Mesh Services Architecture Deep Dive
Live Platform: Architecture and Advanced Programming Techniques
Live Platform: Building Applications with Social Data
Live Platform: FeedSync and Mesh Synchronization Services
Live Platform: Notifications, Awareness, and Communications
Live Platform: The Future of the Device Mesh

We're working on a couple more sessions as well that we hope to unveil once the conference starts.  And our VP, David Treadwell, is confirmed as a keynote speaker.

They'll be a bunch of folks from the Live Platform team spending time in the community areas at PDC, and we're looking forward to your feedback and suggestions, and hearing what you plan to build on top of our platform.

Last week, we posted about an issue that might cause your Live Mesh Folders to either appear to have missing files, or have unexpectedly large numbers of conflicts.  We mentioned that we were testing a fix and we’d update you as soon as possible…and then it got quiet here for a bit.  The good news is that we’ve made a lot of progress since then, so here’s an update.

The root cause of the issue (clients not synching properly after encountering too many tombstones in a row) is fixed.  We actually put this fix into production early last week, and then watched to make sure tombstones were no longer causing any issues.  It’s been a week now, and we’re feeling good that we have this particular tombstone issue fixed.  We grudgingly admit that we are not perfect, and there might be other bugs left in our Tech Preview that cause incorrect conflicts or synch behavior – keep reporting issues that you see, and we’ll keep fixing them.

Of course we also want to help users who previously hit this bug and have folders that are in a confused state.  If you were hitting the issue where folders were only partially synchronizing, you should have already seen this fixed – the first time your client software contacted the server with the fix in production, the server should have returned the complete file list.

If you hit the issue where a folder had a large number of conflicts, we have good news for you here as well.  This particular tombstoning issue affects folders in a very distinct way, since it ends up creating conflicting items whose names and file contents are identical.  Conveniently, this also means that it’s fairly easy to automate clean up of such a folder.  Since we can tell that there are no real conflicts (that is, the files are in fact identical as determined by hashing file contents), we can remove any conflicts and just keep one copy of each file.  The net result is that we’ve written a tool which can identify folders affected by this particular bug, and then automatically clean them up.  The tool runs entirely in our datacenter, it never actually accesses file contents (we create/store the hash on upload), and it never exposes any of the filename data outside the datacenter.  We can ask the tool to give us back a list of LiveIDs of users who have affected folders, and then we can tell the tool to go fix all the folders that a given LiveID owns (if you create a folder, Live Mesh treats you as the owner.)

This tool should fix many of the conflicts created by this tombstone issue, but not all of them.  If your folders have been out of synch, and you’ve been making changes to files on multiple PCs, well then you have actually generated a real conflict (two different copies of the file exist), and it will take your attention to decide which copy to keep. 

Here’s the announcement about the tool that we’re posting to the forums with details on how to get your affected folders cleaned up:

Last week we posted a sticky in our forums containing the details of a recently discovered issue which has resulted in some Live Mesh folders being only partially synchronized. To better serve our customers, we have analyzed our storage service to identify folders that might have been impacted. If our analysis shows that you have a folder that might have been affected by this issue, resulting in either a large number of conflicts associated with your folders or fewer than expected files, you will be receiving an e-mail from us within the next three days asking whether you would like us to perform an automated clean up tool on our servers that will resolve spurious conflicts and retrieve missing files. Further details about this process will be included in that e-mail. Note that while this tool can greatly assist those with large numbers of affected folders, we cannot guarantee that all files and folders will be restored to their original state.

We will also soon be posting steps for performing a manual recovery to help those of you who have a small number of affected folders.

Finally, please remember that Live Mesh is currently a Tech Preview and that you should always backup any data stored in Live Mesh.

UPDATE: We have posted instructions for how to manually clean up affected folders here.

A few users have reported either files missing when they view Live Mesh folders on their computer (but appearing as expected on their Live Desktop) or their computer showing all files but reporting many more conflicts than expected (and their Live Desktop showing duplicate copies of any file with a conflict.) We’ve spent the weekend investigating this, and we have a few details below. But the key news is this:

• Live Mesh is not deleting or losing files. Even if they don’t all appear in Live Mesh folders on your computer, they are all present in a hidden state, as well as on your Live Desktop if the folder is synchronized there.
• Uninstalling the Live Mesh software from a PC will delete the files that are in a hidden state on that PC. If the folder is not synchronized on any other computer or your Live Desktop, then uninstalling will result in the hidden files no longer being available.
• If you stopped synchronizing a folder on your PC, then re-synchronized it, that folder is likely to generate some number of false conflicts.

We're testing a fix for this now and will deploy it as soon as we're confident it’s ready. In the meantime, if you have a Live Mesh folder that appears to be missing files (that is, synchronization appears to be complete but expected files are still not present) or one that has an unexpectedly large number of conflicts, in order to prevent data loss, do not uninstall the Live Mesh software. In addition, do not re-synchronize any folders you had previously stopped synchronizing.

Why is this happening? A technical explanation

In the interest of being open with you, our beloved and valued technology preview testers, we’re happy to provide more detail on what’s causing this behavior. The key to a good synchronization algorithm is understanding the history of all the files in a folder. You want to make sure that any client, even one that hasn’t synchronized in a good long while, can get an accurate list of what changed and what needs to be brought up to date. Part of a complete folder history is keeping track of files or folders that have been deleted, so that if a client comes online and tries to sync a file that doesn’t exist in the up-to-date folder list, we can tell whether it’s a new file or a file someone deleted a while back but is still on this particular client because the file deletion was never synchronized to it. We use the industry jargon tombstone for these deleted files.

What we discovered recently is an interesting edge case around tombstones. Live Mesh performs its synchronization in batches of roughly 50 files at a time. The client asks for the first 50 changes, processes those, then asks for the next 50, and so on. If, through sheer chance, the next batch of 50 items is made up entirely of tombstones—that is, it’s a list of 50 files that have all been deleted since this particular client last synchronized—the storage server gets a little confused. It returns that list of tombstones and then concludes that synchronization has ended. If there are additional file changes, they never get sent to the client. So this can lead to two patterns:

• If you’re synchronizing a folder for the first time, and that folder has this pattern of 50 tombstones in a row, then you get only a partial sync. Any files the server returned before this block of 50 tombstones show up just fine, but any files after that won’t be synchronized to the client.
• If you have first stopped and then restarted synchronization for a particular folder, it gets a little more complicated. In this scenario, when synchronization resumes, the client ought to just quickly see which of the files have changed and get everything up to date. But if a client hits this 50-tombstone-in-a-row bug, the Live Mesh service ends up confused. The client might have tens or even hundreds of files that you and I know are up to date and part of the folder, but the server failed to tell the client about them. So the client has no choice but to conclude that you have a bunch of new files, and that’s what it tells the server. The server, of course, recognizes that files with those names already exist, and so it mistakenly thinks the client has just created a bunch of new files that unfortunately have the exact same names as files already in the folder. Result: sync conflicts, and potentially lots of them.

Now, conflicts are an inevitable part of any synchronization system, and so both the server and client are built to understand what a conflict is and to store any conflicting files in a separate holding area, where they remain until the user decides how to resolve the conflicts. While they are in the holding area, the client software might not display the files as being part of the folder, while the Live Desktop instead represents the conflict by showing both files (yes, this is something we are already working on improving and making consistent ;). So the files are all in your mesh; it’s just not obvious where they are or how to access them.

The one catch is that the client holding area is stored in the Live Mesh folder for temporary application files. This directory is something we remove when the Live Mesh software is uninstalled (also something we are already working on improving—either warning you that uninstalling will remove any files in a conflicted state or just copying all conflicts somewhere else where they won’t get removed on uninstall). So if you somehow end up in a state where the folder is present only on one client, uninstalling the Live Mesh software from that client may remove all files in a conflicted state. That’s bad, we know it’s bad, and that’s why we suggest you don’t uninstall until we fix this issue.

Thanks as always for your continued participation and feedback. Ferreting out issues like this is exactly what our technical preview is designed to do, and so while it’s sometimes a bit painful, we appreciate your help and your patience as we work to get the issue fixed.

Technorati Tags: Live Mesh

We are pleased to announce that our next update is now available. The new build contains a crucial Live Mesh folder synchronization fix – details below. By default your Live Mesh software 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.

Fix:

·         Fixed issue where deleting a Live Mesh folder on one device, or stopping the folder from synchronizing on that device, would cause the folder to stop synchronizing on all devices.

If any of your Live Mesh folders have been affected by this issue, please use the following steps to re-establish stable sync relationships for those folders:

1.       Update the Live Mesh software on all of your device to the newest version.

2.       If any affected folders are currently set to synchronize with your mesh, please stop those folders from synchronizing on each of your devices.

a.       Right-click on the folder and select Live Mesh Options, then click Change Sync Settings

b.       For each device, under Synchronize files, select Never with this device.

3.       Once you have removed the affected folders from your mesh, you can then add them back in again by right-clicking the folder and selecting Add folder to your Live Mesh.

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 Live Mesh and User Account Control (UAC)” Announcement on the Live Mesh forums for further information.

Thank you for helping us test Live Mesh!

Technorati Tags: LiveMesh

Amit Mital here – I run the Live Mesh & Developer Platform team. At Web 2.0 in April we announced Live Mesh and opened it up for people to try out our platform experience -- the first evidence of what scenarios our platform is capable of enabling.

We said we’d tell you more about Live Mesh and give you access to the platform in the future, allowing you to build your own experiences on top of Live Mesh.  En route to opening up the developer platform we’ve been systematically updating and expanding the tech preview to help us scale out the underlying technology (see behind the mesh). We’ve enjoyed watching our service handling the load, and we want more!

Today we are again increasing the number of available slots in the Live Mesh Technology Preview, and expanding the list of countries that will allow sign-up without a wait list to include Canada, India and Ireland! (although you still need to run with an English locale for now.) This is in addition to the availability we’ve previously announced for USA, UK, Australia and New Zealand (see coverage map).

The experience you see today is just tip of the iceberg!  To see what the Live Mesh platform is capable of, check out the Channel 9 videos, and try out the user experience.  We’re eager for you help to keep pushing our scale, and your feedback!

We do still have a maximum limit on the number of users we’ll allow into the Technology Preview, but as long as we’re below the limit, anyone in the countries above can sign-up today with no delays or wait list.

…but today’s implementation is not ;)  Our underlying platform is designed to enable a wide range of scenarios, at broad Internet scale. We closely watch the feedback from our Technology Preview users along with the health and performance of the service, using it to continually improve the system and ramp up our scale.

As we go through this process, we’re hearing your questions about how many folders and files users can put in Live Mesh today. Here’s a quick summary of the upper bounds we’re testing against ourselves at the moment – we’ll expect these numbers to keep going up with subsequent service updates. [UPDATE: these are not limits that are hard coded into the system.  They are boundary guidelines we've established based on internal and external feedback, and we're confident that anything under these boundaries will work well for all users.  Because they are not hard coded limits, you can exceed these boundaries, and at that point your mileage may vary.  Feel free to certify and share your own success stories...and stay tuned as we will definitely increase these boundaries/guidelines as we complete further tuning and testing.]

• Size we've currently tested for contents in a single Live Folder: 10GB 17GB 40GB (go Mesh test team go!) (of course there’s still the 5GB quota which limits how much you can synchronize with the Live Desktop)
• Individual file size: 2GB
• Items (file or folders) per Live Folder: 100,000
• Members per Live Folder: 200
• Number of Live Folders per user: 200
• Number of devices per user: 100

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.

We're continually working to fix bugs reported by our Tech Preview users, as well as implement popular feature requests (hello UAC ;). We pushed a new update out last night (version 0.9.2815.17) that includes some key fixes noted below. You'll be automatically notified of the update by your Live Mesh client software, or you can right click the Notifier icon in the system tray and choose "Update Live Mesh" to force an immediate upgrade.

Thank you for all your great feedback, and keep it coming!  You can submit (and view others’) feedback and bugs here on the Microsoft Connect website.  Read and participate in the forums for current discussions about fixes, problems, and ways people are incorporating Live Mesh into their daily routines.  Send us private feedback using our online contact form.

Fixes

• Live Mesh is now available in all English-speaking countries (not just the U.S.)
• Removed the User Account Control (UAC) requirement when installing and using Live Mesh with Windows Vista SP1 (as promised)
• Index for Desktop Search now works with Live Mesh folders
• Fixed bug where an underscore in a Hotmail account name returned an “Invalid Hotmail Address” error
• Fixed bug with Silverlight 2 Beta 2 failing to load in Silverlight Media View
• Fixed bug where the notifier tooltip incorrectly indicated that Live Mesh Remote Desktop was unavailable for a computer running in non-admin mode
• Fixed bug where the Live Mesh folder icon was not displayed in the e-mail inviting someone to share a folder
• Fixed one of the bugs that caused Live Mesh to fail to start
• Fixed problem with Live Mesh returning errors when waking from sleep/hibernate

Hi, I am Nikolai Smolyanskiy, a developer on the Accounts team. I work on the Account service that takes care of account management, and user/device authentication and authorization in Live Mesh.

There were many questions asked by early adopters about how their data is transmitted and stored in Live Mesh, and how access is controlled. In this post I’ll talk about the security and authorization architecture behind Live Mesh, so that you understand the amount of care we take and feel better about trusting your data to the Mesh. This post can also be found here.

Here is the diagram that illustrates all communications between user devices and Live Mesh cloud services and encryption/security mechanisms used in these communication channels:

Live Mesh security is rooted at the authentication provider (Windows Live ID, aka Microsoft Passport is our provider today) which is used for initial user and device authentication. Once a user or a device is authenticated and a corresponding authentication token is obtained, the Live Mesh client passes this token to the Live Mesh Account service to access the root of the user’s mesh and to get the initial set of Live Mesh tickets. These tickets are used for further Mesh operations on other resources that this root is pointing to. All communications with the Live Mesh cloud services are done via HTTPS / SSL, so 3^rd parties cannot intercept and read client-server communication.

All user (or device) related resources in Live Mesh are organized in a RESTful manner, i.e. they form a graph where each node is identified by a unique URL and represents a given resource. Nodes contain resource metadata and links to other resources. Mesh operations are essentially CRUD operations on the nodes of the user tree or nodes of other user trees if those users shared any data. Live Mesh cloud services check access rights in each operation by inspecting passed tickets and authorizing access only if a correct set of tickets is passed. Tickets can be obtained from the Account service or from responses to previous cloud operations.

Live Mesh authorization tickets are standard SAML tickets. They are digitally signed with the Live Mesh private key to prevent spoofing and they expire after a limited lifetime. Some tickets are used to just authenticate users or devices, other tickets contain authorization information about user/device rights. Cloud services inspect each resource request and authorize access only if it contains valid tickets (correctly signed and not expired) and these tickets specify that the requestor indeed has access to the requested resource. For example, a device X can initiate P2P data synchronization with device Y only if it presents a ticket that is correctly signed by Live Mesh and contains a record saying that both device X and Y are claimed by the same user OR if it contains a record saying that X and Y have the same Live Mesh Folder mapped on them (in the case that the devices are claimed by different users that are members of this Live Mesh Folder). Tickets are passed to the cloud services in the Authorization header using HTTPS to prevent replay attacks.

Each device in Live Mesh (computers, PDAs, mobile phones) has a unique private key that is generated during Live Mesh installation and used to authenticate the device in P2P communications with other devices. When a P2P communication is being established between two devices, they first use asymmetric encryption (RSA algorithm) to exchange encryption keys and then use symmetric encryption (AES with 128 bit key) to transfer data/files over TCP/IP. The RSA exchange guards against leaking symmetric encryption keys. AES encryption protects actual data from prying eyes. Live Mesh also uses a keyed message authentication code (HMAC) to verify the integrity of the data exchanged on a P2P channel.

If there is no direct connection between two devices (for example, if one device is behind a firewall), then the cloud communication relay located in the Microsoft data center is used to forward data packets from one device to another. All the traffic is encrypted in the same way as in the case with direct P2P link, i.e. first keys are exchanged with RSA and then traffic is encrypted with AES. The cloud relay cannot decrypt/read user data, since encryption keys are exchanged with the use of asymmetric encryption (RSA).

Live Mesh cloud services help devices find each other and establish communications. They cannot read synchronized user data/files relayed through the cloud, except for the case when user files are synchronized with the cloud storage (i.e. Live Desktop). At the moment, the limited Tech Preview of Live Mesh synchronizes your files not only between your devices, but also with your cloud storage (which you can access via Live Desktop) until you reach your storage quota (5GB as of today). So your files and metadata that describes them are stored in the Microsoft datacenter. They are protected by strong access control mechanisms, but the data is not stored in encrypted form. After the storage quota has been reached, all files are synchronized only P2P and not stored in the cloud (only metadata is stored in the datacenter). In the future, Live Mesh will allow users to selectively choose which files or Live Mesh Folders they want to synchronize with the cloud. If you choose to synchronize your data/files between your devices only, Live Mesh will not store your files in the cloud and will only store metadata that lets the service to operate.

We've been listening to your feedback here and on the forum, and made a number of bug fixes and changes to better suit you. The update will be published later today. You may notice a slowdown in service or some display issues (missing icons, folders slow or not synchronizing) while the servers update. If you are still seeing these problems after the 20^th, please report them!

To install the new version

· Use Live Mesh! New updates will automatically apply when you log in.

Tell us what you think

· Read and participate in the forums for current discussions about fixes, problems, and ways people are incorporating Live Mesh into their daily routines.

Invite your friends and family

· Share a folder with your family or friends so they can experience Live Mesh, too.

What we fixed

News

· News not appearing until a second person has logged in.

Language settings

· Fixed date format and removed region requirement. You still need to set your OS language to English.

· User names with non-US-ASCIIcharacters are now supported.

Notifier

· Fixed device appearing offline in the notifier but showing online on your Live Desktop.

· Fixed synchronization failure when the network is unavailable.

Explorer

· Fixed the Windows Explorer crash when folders were closed

· Fixed the Windows XP “Roaming Desktop Icons” issue with Live Mesh Remote Desktop.

· Fixed the mesh bar not always opening when you open a Live Mesh folder

Live Desktop

· Fixed the “I’m interested in” in your Windows Live ID profile to be correctly viewed. No longer will you be “searching for love and romance” when you really wanted “Enterprise Networking.”

Live Mesh

· Fixed logs not being collected when your Windows XP login name has a space in it

· Fixed SilverLight version error with the Beta release

· Fixed SilverLight Play and Pause buttons being swapped around

· Fixed login names with a single character domain (livemesh @ m.com) not working correctly

Thank you for your time and participation!

Yesterday (May 12^th) we experienced an email service outage from approximately 12:30pm to 8:00pm PST.  If you invited anyone to share a folder during this time, they likely did not receive the invitation email.  We don't yet have support for re-sending an invitation, so for now the best option is to remove any impacted users and then re-invite them.

To re-invite a user:

1. Delete the pending invitation
   1. Sign in to Live Mesh at http://www.mesh.com
   2. Click on the Desktop button to view the Live Desktop
   3. Locate your folder on the Live Desktop and double click it
   4. On the right hand side of the folder view you will see the Live Mesh bar, click on Members at the bottom of the bar
   5. Confirm that the person you invited is still listed as being in the Pending state
   6. Click on Edit
   7. Select the person and then click Remove
   8. Now click OK
2. Re-invite the member
   1. While still in the Live Desktop view of the folder that you want to invite the member to, click on Add
   2. Type the email address of the person you would like to invite to the folder
   3. Click OK

Thank you for your understanding and for participating in the Live Mesh Tech Preview to help us make a better product.