Spy Journal 3.0 Filtering the web for you

I have something like 20 or more websites open in browser that I want to be able to review or recommend. I haven’t got time so I will link them here, tag on delicious and clip into socialmedian as appropriate.

Here goes.

Microsoft

• Windows Live One Care for Server. Free trial. Works on Server 2008 Standard 64 bit, SBS 2008 Standard and Premium.
• File Dialogs – adding My Places in the File Open and File Save As dialog boxes. Quickly find frequently used locations on your PC or network.
• Adding signatures to email in Windows Live Hotmail
• Plugins – Flickr for Live Writer, Flickr for Outlook, Flickr for Word. Zemanta for Windows Live Writer. Hat tip to Sarah Perez from Channel 10 for this. (see our Geek Girl profile on Sarah)
• Another from Sarah is the Circle Dock Application launcher. Go straight to Circle Dock.
• How to share large files without attaching them to email
• Bulk convert old documents to new Office 2007 format from Digital Inspiration. I will be trialing this with a set of copied documents to test the results.

I have written several posts about Live Mesh already. If you won’t know what it is then here is a short explanation of Live Mesh.

We have implemented Live Mesh in our organisation to provide the following solutions:

• Synchronisation between staff members of web development files. Currently being used by 1 staff member in China and 2 in Brisbane.
• Synchronisation of clients files between my office and theirs. Being used by one client so far.
• Synchronisation of files between my PC and my laptop for travelling. Being used for several projects as well as access to other files.
• Synchronisation on my PC between my virtual machine and my local  machine for software development files. This is better than using mapped network drives because the history tells me what files have been updated or added.

Amanda is currently researching the use of Live Mesh to share pictures between her work PC, her home PC and her friends PC so that they can seamlessly share hi-res photos. She will write about that soon.

However another possibility has crossed my mind and that is of using Live Mesh for simple file backup. I think this has a great potential for most of our smaller clients with one or to pcs and no backup solution, or maybe only a backup hard drive. I will be trialing this with one particular client who also has a remote access need and see how good it works. I note that PST files are excluded however but the remainder of his files should be able to be backed up online.

Here is some recent news about the Live Mesh capabilities and “limits”

• Size of all contents in a single Live Folder: 10GB (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

The countries it is currently enabled for (English locale only) are US, Australia, New Zealand, UK, Canada, India and Ireland. So sign up quick!

I got this email today from the Live Mesh Team.

I am now using Live mesh to keep folder synchronised between my laptop, my pc, a clients machine where I work regularly and my virtual machine where I do my Office 2003 development. It has made me way more productive. Live Mesh is awesome!

The Live Mesh team is pleased to announce the release of our next update, available later today. We are making Live Mesh available to more people and we've greatly streamlined the sign-up process. We've also made a number of general performance improvements. See below for the details, and thank you for using Live Mesh.

Version numbers

• Live Mesh software: 0.9.3103.9
• Live Desktop: 0.9.3103.9

Fixes

• Raised the limit on the total number of customers we'll allow to access the Live Mesh Tech Preview.
• Expanded availability: you can sign up directly, with no waiting list, if your country/region is the United States, United Kingdom, Australia, or New Zealand.
• Removed the limit on the number of Live Mesh invitations you have. Invite new friends and family members to the Live Mesh Tech Preview.
• For our customers in countries/regions other than those above, we've greatly simplified the waiting list process. You no longer need to sign up through Microsoft Connect. You can sign in with your Windows Live ID on www.mesh.com, click Sign Up, and you'll automatically be notified once Live Mesh is available in your country/region.
• Improved the performance of peer-to-peer synchronization.
• General performance improvements.

WHS

The Windows Home Server Power Pack 1 was released just the other day, and I took the opportunity in the weekend to install it and then reconnect all the PCs to it. They all worked flawlessly. The most exciting thing is now my 2 Vista 64 machines are now connected and being backed up. Previously one wasn’t being backed up at all though there was no data on the machine, and the other which is my workstation was being backed up to an internal 500gb drive.

If you have a Windows Home Server I recommend downloading the upgrade as it also fixes the data corruption error previously found in a few small number of installs with multiple hard drives.

Microsoft Office