Use Case For Live Mesh: Save The Inbox

As MVP’s we’ve had the opportunity to use Live Mesh for a while now – with a few invites spread around the GBM community for others to play with us.  Here at GottaBeMobile.com we use Live Mesh for some of our file transfers back and forth between each other.  Things like Podcasts files and InkShow segments are easily shared between us all.

I have taken the syncing and put in a system here at my ‘day job’.  We pass files around normally via e-mail or off the server.  Most of the time things work well, but there are times when things don’t:

• Each mailbox on our Exchange server is capped at 100 mb, so we are very limited on the size of emails we send each other and store in the mailbox.  That sounds like a lot, but we are dealing with 5-7 meg files that are transferred each time – maybe 2-3 times when it’s all said and done. As you can see, it only takes a couple of large emails to fill that mailbox!  Add in the other daily e-mails and you stack up even more data in there.
• Working from home – Different members of the team work some from home.  To get on the network and access the servers, we have to VPN.  VPN is sometimes slow and we can’t stay on there for extended periods of time.

We have solved some of the problem by using Live Mesh to share files between the team.  Yes, there are other options out there, but using Mesh was something we had access to and was a great way to provide some feedback to the Beta team.  Our process in a nutshell:

1. Take our group of files (what we are working with are ESRI shapefiles – each ‘file’ is a group of about 4-7 files) and zip them up for transfer
2. Drag and drop that file into the synced Live Mesh folder on my desktop
3. Send an e-mail to the other person in the team (more on this in a second)
4. Synced automatically to their desktop
5. They review/edit the files
6. Zip files back up
7. Put back in the mesh
8. E-mail me that they are there (more on this too :) )

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With this process the files are synced in the background and when I am ready they are there for me to review!  My biggest complaint about our system/Live Mesh – notifications!!  There is nothing that notifies the other person there is something new in the folder.  There is an icon in the tray – make it a different color when something has changed.  Have a ‘notification bubble’ come up, but one that can be disabled as I am sure some people won’t like that feature.  I don’t want to say the process ‘fails’, but the process has a hiccup because we have to send out an e-mail to tell each other there is something new in the folder.  It would be nice if that part of the process didn’t have to happen.

Other than that one beef with Live Mesh, we have been pleased with our new transfer system and plan to stick with it for a little while.  How do you use Live Mesh??

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