Live Mesh Preview Broadens to More Users

 

Microsoft this week broadened its tech preview of Live Mesh, allowing more users to get an early glimpse of the much discussed device and data synchronization service. The Live Mesh service lets people share data among multiple Windows computers, Macs, PCs and various devices, as well as opening up the possibility for desktop applications to add online components and web apps to add offline components.

It runs symmetrically on all your computing devices, in the part of the cloud that’s associated with devices, and in other parts of the cloud where services you transact with are running. The platform connectivity layer is based on FeedSync mechanism, a synchronization system based on the same simple technology that powers the blogosphere: XML feeds of items, in RSS or Atom formats. All LiveMesh objects (big media files or small calendar events) are synchronized across the mesh by feeds.

Ray Ozzie, Microsoft’s Chief Software Architect in his first Channel 9 interview  discusses the Live Mesh technology and platform that enables synchronization and storage “to the cloud”.

Learn more about  Live Mesh here

Microsoft Online Services

 

Microsoft earlier this week unveiled in Houston at the Microsoft Worldwide Partner Conference Microsoft Online Services. This new service offering provides “deskless worker” tools for productivity for telecommuting, which many employers and workers increasingly favour.

This offering includes hosted Exchange, Sharepoint, Communication Server and Dynamics CRM hosted by Microsoft as part of the new online service platform.

The pricing model as shown above for $15 per month per person, the business productivity suite offers an Outlook-integrated Exchange Online for e-mail and calendars, Office SharePoint Online collaboration, messaging via Office Communications Online, and Office Live Meeting video-enabled Web conferencing.

The Deskless Work suite is offered for additional $3 per month per user which combines flavors of SharePoint Online and Exchange Online. The SharePoint portal offers access to internal company sites and search. E-mail, calendars, security filters, and Outlook Web Access Light are included with Exchange Online Deskless Worker.

There has been a tremendous amount of interest and adoption of Microsoft Online Services. In just the past year, Microsoft has sold more than a half million seats for Microsoft Online Services. To help businesses plan, deploy and operate the services, Microsoft is releasing new Microsoft Solution Accelerators for Microsoft Online Services. These include new automated tools and guidance, such as the Microsoft Assessment and Planning Toolkit, the Infrastructure Planning and Design Guide and the Microsoft Operations Framework Companion Guide.  More information about Microsoft Solution Accelerators for Microsoft Online Services can be found here.

This is another exciting announcement as part of our Software + Services strategy, where Microsoft Online Services will continue to make available “finished services” on our Windows Azure Services Platform

Deep Zoom – What a Cool Feature in Silverlight 2

 

Deep Zoom is a cool feature in Silverlight and was the subject of one of the coolest keynote demos Hard Rock Memorabilia 2.0 shown at the MIX08 conference held in March’08. The Memorabilia page presents 258 items — instruments, letters, wardrobe pieces, public records and more — which you can then zoom in for a look at the details, say, of Eric Clapton’s guitar (try it; the detail is incredible). The Deep Zoom (formerly known as SeaDragon) is a new way for people to interact with content.  It allows users to explore collections of super high resolution imagery, from a 2 or 3 megapixel shot from a digital camera to gigapixel scans of museum pieces, all without waiting for huge file downloads.

Here is a cool must see demo DeepzoomObama created by Donavon West of channel9 . This demo is a gigapixel (10000×10000) mosaic image which is created from over 12,000 thumbnails uploaded by Obama supporters on www.BarackObama.com.

After seeing the above demos I was amazed at the power of Silverlight and Deep Zoom. Additional information about the scenarios for Deep Zoom, internals and How To is available at the Microsoft Developer Network. A technology preview of Deep Zoom Composer tool which helps in preparation of images for use with Silverlight Deep Zoom feature is available at  Microsoft Download Center.

PDC2008

 

Experience the Future of the Microsoft Platform

Register early for PDC2008 which is set for Oct27-30 at the Los Angeles Convention Center. This is a premier event hosted by Microsoft for leading-edge developers and architects to understand the future of the Microsoft platform and technical strategy.

In past years, the PDC has unveiled Microsoft .NET, Windows^® XP, Windows Vista^®, and other significant milestones in the evolution of the Microsoft platform. This year, you’ll hear more details about our services platform, the future of Windows, mobility, and our next generation of developer tools. 

Ray Ozzie (Microsoft Chief Software Architect) will be the featured Keynote speaker on the first day of the PDC2008 conference and there will be over 160 technical sessions.

Participate in the online social communities for PDC2008 and make the connection with Microsoft and your peers. Take the opportunity to network, share information, get answers, and swap best practices with others.

Become a fan of Microsoft PDC on Facebook

Stay connected to PDC via Twitter

Post and explore PDC2008 images on Flickr

Windows Live Writer

 Windows Live Writer is developed by Microsoft, is a desktop blog-publishing application that is part of the Windows Live range of products.

It features WYSIWYG authoring (You can now author your post and know exactly what it will look like before you publish it), photo-publishing and map-publishing functionality, and is currently compatible with Windows Live Spaces, Blogger, LiveJournal, TypePad, WordPress, Community_Server, the MetaWeblog API, the Moveable Type API, and all blogs that support RSD (Really Simple Discoverability).

Windows Live Writer introduces the Provider Customization API that enables both rich customization of Windows Live Writer’s behavior as well as the opportunity to add new functionality to the product. Currently Windows Live Spaces, WordPress, and TypePad have all taken advantage of this API to expose additional service-specific features within Windows Live Writer.

Windows Live Writer is currently available in 6 different languages

The latest technical pre-review download and latest features is available at the Live Writer team blog post

This blog is being written using Live Writer and my experience has been great and the tool is intuitive.

There are instructional videos available on  training available on how to use the tool at the Live team blog post