The Productive Organizer

What is windows live sync?

In a nutshell, Microsoft decided some time recently that the cloud is where they want to do a major push to (abit late I feel).

This service enables you to synchronize up to 2GB of your files and folders with

1. Your other computers
2. Microsoft’s Cloud storage

You install a Sync application on each of your computer and it seamlessly takes care of the synchronization of the files and folders on its own.

Note:This is not something new.I talk about a few service that is free some time ago. Most notably

1. Soonr

How much files and folders can I store/synchronies/backup ?

As of now you can store up to 2GB of files

How much will this cost me?

It is FREE

What are the benefits?

1. Your files and folders are accessible across all your computers
2. In the future it might be accessible via iPhone,Android or WP7
3. In the event of a computer breakdown and is irrecoverable, your files are intact
4. Microsoft’s data server should have disaster recovery and redundancy, so the chances of you losing these files are low

How does it work?

1) Download Windows Live Essentials Beta from here.

2) Run the setup. You can install the rest of the stuff but make sure  you check the sync.

3) Once its installed you will see a sync icon in your windows system tray. Alternatively, go to Windows Essentials > Windows Live Sync.

4) this is your Sync Dashboard. Here you will see I am setting it up on one computer.

5) First thing is to click on Sync a folder, to identify which folder to sync across all your computers and microsoft.

6) I don’t just make use of one sync service, but if you see here I have Evernote,Dropbox,SugarSync,Syncplicity and now LiveSync. Essentially, I have almost 8GB of data under sync.

7) Create a folder for syncing (you can call it whatever you want I call it Live Sync)

8)Then check to sync to SkyDrive synced storage

9) You are set up. Here is a shot of me synchronizing 3 files. Once I moved them into my windows folders, on the web page it will indicate that its syncing 3 files.

It looks like Microsoft will start letting us test their web version of Office. Really excited to see how well this performs against competition such as Zoho.com and Google Docs

WebWorkerDaily Did their round of testing. Sure looks good.

I saw a demo of the new apps yesterday, and have to say that they look quite impressive. Office Web Apps will be available for free through Windows Live Skydrive (which also offers 25GB of free cloud storage), and will consist of web app equivalents of Word, Excel, PowerPoint and OneNote. Unlike the more stripped-down Google Apps and Zoho, the documents in Office Web Apps look virtually identical to those in the desktop version of Office. So, for example, charts will appear in Excel worksheets just as they appear on your local machine, and formatting is retained in Word documents (margins, fonts, watermarks, tables, images, etc.). This means that you should be able to create much richer, print-ready documents using Office Web Apps than you can with Zoho or Google Apps. Much of the interface is also borrowed from the desktop apps, which should help transition users to the web apps.

As you might expect, the web apps have a more limited feature set than the desktop apps. For example, while you can do reasonably complex things like add and remove columns in Excel and see charts update as a result of changes you make, you can’t create new charts. For that, you’ll need to use the desktop app — there’s a handy button that you can use to switch to editing the document on the desktop, though. On the other hand, the Web Apps have some nice cloud-enabled features; the Excel and OneNote Web Apps allow simultaneous editing by multiple users, for example. (Concurrent multi-user editing is not available in Word or PowerPoint, as Microsoft says that people find it distracting.)

Perhaps surprisingly, given Microsoft’s track record, Office Web Apps should be reasonably cross-browser compatible. Officially supported browsers are Internet Explorer, Firefox and Safari (although others, like Chrome and Opera, are not blocked and will probably also work), and while the Powerpoint and Word Web Apps will use Silverlight if it’s available, it’s not a requirement.

[WebWorkerDaily has the full info >>]