Posts Tagged ‘Mesh’

Will Mesh kick start Information Rights Management?

Monday, November 10th, 2008

I’m a big fan of Live Mesh.  I’ve been using it pretty much since it launched a few months ago and have a few folders which I keep synchronised between my various computers.  It’s one of those things that you don’t realise you need until you have it… and then start using a computer without it.  I find it invaluable, especially now the Mac client is out.

Now whilst I’m aware that Mesh is much more than the simple file synchronisation stuff that’s included in the client, over the past few week it this that has had me thinking about it’s implications.

Most of the folders that I sync in my Mesh are personal – favourites, a few pictures, maybe a tune or two.  But the other week I had a huge amount of reading to do for a project so  I decided that I’d leave the office early and do the reading at home.  Rather than pick up my laptop I just moved the docs into a Meshed folder then went home knowing that the docs would be at home long before I was. 

It’s this simplicity that I think could cause businesses a headache.   It’s never been so easy to send documents to multiple computers – including a cloud desktop – than with Mesh.  Just by saving a document in a Meshed folder on my laptop I send it to three other PC’s and a Mac.  On my folders only I have access, but I could potentially be sharing that information with anyone.

Now as a user I find this very useful, but as an enterprise IT guy it’s kinda scary.  Whilst you’ve always been able email documents home, or use a USB stick to carry documents, Mesh takes this to a whole new level.  As a business I no longer have control over where my information goes or who can access it – my workers now control this.  Hopefully they’ll be responsible and make the right decisions… but all the recent news stories about data loss would suggest that isn’t always the case.

I suppose we could be draconian and just stop people using tools like Mesh, but in truth if it’s not Mesh, it’ll be email or some other media that will catch us out.  If you can’t fully control where your information is going, perhaps your best bet is to protect the information itself.

That’s where Information Rights Management may be useful.  It’s been around as a concept and a product for years, but in my experience it’s always had a limited uptake.  In a world where information and data is flowing beyond the reach of traditional network boundaries IRM and other de-perimeterisation solutions may soon become a necessity.

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iPhones in the Mesh

Friday, October 31st, 2008

I’ve been using Mesh on my PC’s for a while now, it’s hard to say just how useful it it having my documents and files available where ever I am.  It’s one of those things that you don’t realise you need until you have it!

With the release of the Mac and Windows Mobile CTP’s this week, I’ve been thinking a bit more about how to use Mesh more.  One obvious gap is my iPhone.  It’s a device that I carry with me more or less everywhere, but the one device I can’t use with Mesh.

It wasn’t until I watched the Mesh on Mac video over on on10 over lunch that I thought about using the mesh mobile interface that’s available on m.mesh.com.  Having tried it out I have to say that it works really well. 

From the mobile site you can access all of the folders and content that you have synced with your Mesh Desktop.  You can also read all of the associated news and updates and manage the membership of those folders. 

The iPhone will open and render many of the typical doc types (Images, Word, Excel, Powerpoint, PDF etc), but won’t unfortunately let you open and listen to MP3 files that you may have there.  It was worth a try I guess!

 

 photo2 photo3 photo1

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MeshMobile (as in ‘BatMobile’!)

Friday, October 31st, 2008

Ages ago when Live Mesh was first announced I watched Ori Amiga’s demo on Channel 9 that showed not just the File sharing aspects of Mesh, but how it could be used for applications.  It really impressed me and being a bit of a petrolhead one of the first apps I thought about was something for cars.  Syncing Music of course, but also SatNav info or settings and diagnostics.

Good news is, I’m not mad and Ori had the same idea!  Channel 9 have just posted up a video of a ‘MeshMobile’ solution they’ve been building.  Take a look for yourself, but I think it’s a great idea.  It’ll be interesting to see whether anyone picks this up and starts building products.  With small, low cost, Atom based computers now commonplace it shouldn’t be too hard – as Ori has proved!

Ori Amiga: Mesh Mobile

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Macs in the Mesh

Thursday, October 30th, 2008

After a couple of false starts the Mesh team have just released the Community Tech Preview of the Mesh client.

I’ve just installed it on my Macbook here and at all works very well indeed.  Once signed in you can add and sync your Meshed folders easily and get to all the same docs and files.  Good stuff!

The only thing that doesn’t seem to work (though I’ve not tried to hard I have to admit) is the remote control functionality – controlling other device from the mac at least.  Still, that’s not too important and it’ll be so handy to have all my Meshed folders available on my Mac.

To get the client head over to the Mesh site on your Mac and follow the usual process for adding a device.  It might be worth hurrying though, I beleive that the Mac CTP has a limited number of places for now.

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Mesh for Mac

Tuesday, July 29th, 2008

Looks like the Mac Live Mesh client has been released – despite the ‘Microsoft Confidential – Internal Use Only’ lable at the bottom of the installation window :)

Anyways, here it is: https://www.mesh.com/Web/MacDownload.aspx
Update:  I may have spoken to soon there… although the client installed properly, once it started it asks for an update but then fails to find the files it looks for on the web.  Not sure if thats just me though.

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File Virtualisation and the cloud

Thursday, June 5th, 2008

There’s a great post over on arstechnica asked for a home storage cloud that would seamlessly link together all his home storage.

"So I’m ready for some cloud storage. But I don’t want all my gadgets to connect to some distant cloud. Rather, I want them to be the cloud, so that my data surrounds me like some mist with a life of its own, instead of sitting in these little isolated balls that I have to juggle."

While I was reading though it two things came to mind, the first was Mesh and other cloud storage services.  After all why have storage in your home if you can get it cheaper in the cloud. 

Of course for home media use cloud storage itself isn’t much help, you need the data locally.  That’s where Mesh could play a part by taking care of syncing data across devices via the cloud.  However in this scenario either all the data would be on all the devices or you’d need to setup and maintain lots of individual folders.  Oh… and 5GB isn’t going to hold much music these days.

The second thing that came to mind was a File Virtualisation solution I saw last year from Acopia (now owned by f5).  File virtualisation provides a lay of abstraction between clients that create and consume data and the storage devices that it is stored on.

acopia

Essentially the virtualisation layer provides a single namespace that all clients connect to.  As this layer is abstracted from where and how the data is physically stored the data can be located in the best place for that data.  What’s more it can be dynamically moved around physical storage devices without these changes ever being visible to the clients.

This lets you do very clever things.  You can automatically determine what the most accessed files are an move them to your fastest storage.  The least accessed ones you can move to cheap, slow storage.  Don’t want MP3’s clogging up you file servers? (well it is an enterprise solution…) That’s fine, just define a rule that says all MP3’s should be hosted on a single cheap NAS somewhere.  Need to move all the data off a SAN that’s seen better days?  No worries, setup a rule or task and it’ll be moved without the clients ever seeing a thing.

Ok… so for now this sort of thing is the realm of Enterprises.  And Enterprises with deep pockets.  But, it is – I think – what Jon is looking for in his article – his digital mist (I like that term!).  Probably more so than Mesh, at least for now. 

However… if Mesh is providing a ring of devices on which you’d like to store your data.  It’s not too hard to see someone writing an equivalent of the Acopia ‘rulebase’ to manage a set of devices linked using the Mesh framework.

Could be quite useful in a few years.

(I was impressed that in replying to the post on arstechnica I had to sign-in using an account I created in 1999!)

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What might Mesh mean for Office and businesses?

Wednesday, May 21st, 2008

I’ve been playing about with the Mesh preview for a week or so now and overall I’m pretty impressed.  Unfortunately I’ve not had time to look at the dev side of things (or it could be that I couldn’t code my way out of a paper bag…) but its clear from talking to developer buddies that they’re equally interested. 

Anyway, I was chatting about Mesh earlier and the subject of Office and other ‘business’ apps came up.  Or more specifically what, if anything, Mesh would mean to them.

I guess the most obvious place that Mesh could integrated is Groove.  It’s one of Ray Ozzies former projects and has more than a little in common with Mesh – or at least the functionality provided in the preview. 

The most common use  of Groove is peer to peer, you’d create a workspace or share a folder with a number of people, but there’d be no central point where the data was kept waiting for other people to come online when you were away. 

There is however the option to use Groove Enterprise Services to provide the equivalent of the cloud Mesh, a centralised service that clients could sync with which would then be available to pass on changes to other users as they came online.  Using Mesh as the sync provider for new iterations of Groove would seem to make sense.  The question to my mind is quite how that might work. 

One option would be to allow clients to sync directly with the Mesh cloud.  Although that would be the obvious and easiest solution it may not always suit enterprises.  Clients would all be syncing directly to the Internet over the corporate network, not ideal unless you have huge bandwidth.  Some companies may also be unhappy about having a copy of all their synced data sat outside of their network.

One way to provide enterprises with some additional flexibility might be to provide some form of internal Mesh – an internal Mesh cloud that clients can sync with privately.  Potentially this cloud could then sync with the main Mesh cloud in a controlled way to allow a company to better manage the bandwidth over it’s Internet connection.

How would such a Mesh cloud be delivered?  Maybe as part of Exchange or SharePoint?

One of the examples Ori Amiga gave in his Channel 9 video showed how updates made to data in an application could be synced in near real-time to other Mesh clients.  In his example he used a family tree application, but for some reason it reminded me of the Excel Calculation services in SharePoint 2007. 

ECS allows you to maintain a central version of an Excel worksheet and show updates in real-time via a SharePoint webpart (that’s a huge simplification I know).  Presumably if Excel was able to use Mesh, changes to shared workbooks could be synced with other users of that workbook.  How useful that might be I’m not sure – I’m not a huge Excel user – but the same could apply to PowerPoint or Word.

The other day I read a blog post about using Mesh as a messaging platform, unfortunately I can’t find it now to reference it.  The gist of the post was that Mesh and Feedsync provide the basis for simple IM and email tools. 

Thinking it through a bit more though surely Mesh would make a great platform for an enterprise Twitter style messaging platform?  This could be a component for Outlook or Communicator that connects directly to Live Mesh or possibly connect the notional local cloud I mentioned up above. 

Of course this all just speculation, but given the obvious investment MS has made in Mesh it would seem sensible to use the framework in some of its other products. 

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Can I please have my Car added to the Mesh?

Friday, May 2nd, 2008

I figure it would save me a lot of time burning music to CD’s. 

In fact while I think of it… I’d like to be able to set all of the options on my car Radio from my laptop while I’m at work.  Maybe all the other car settings as well.  A silverlight app for that would be nice. 

And while I’m doing that maybe I could setup the sat-nav?  Not my contacts though, I enter those on my phone, the car can grab those from the mesh on its own.

Oh, and it would be quite cool if my cameras were meshified.  I’d like all the pictures I take to be meshed, and then I’d like to be able to tag the ones I want to put on Flickr.  It’d be easier to do than from my PDA though, the little buttons on the camera are a bit awkward.

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Why spoil the good work?

Thursday, April 24th, 2008

As you might have spotted, due to the work I’m doing at the moment I keep a pretty close eye on Microsoft and what its doing.  Over the past week or so I think thing they’ve had a fairly good week, news about the Live Mesh platform has started to arrive and it looks great, most of the comment I’ve read about it has been very positive.

So why go and do this?  ‘Microsoft to nuke MSN Music DRM keys‘. It looks like MS are decommissioning the infrastructure that support the DRM used for music bought on the old MSN Music site.  What genius made that decision?  How expensive can it be to keep those servers running?  Surely they’re never going to get busier or require scaling now MSN Music is gone.  Given all the free storage and hosting MS is throwing about chopping off this service can’t really improve the bottom line can it?  All this will do is generate bad press and piss people off… it seems crazy.  Oh well.

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