Windows Live Essentials 2011: Why It's Worth Exploring

Last week, Microsoft unveiled its Windows Live Essentials 2011 suite, offering new editions of Live Mesh, Messenger, Mail, Photo Gallery, and other applications. Though some of the Live Essentials programs are geared more toward home consumers, several of them are handy tools for the business world and worth exploring for you and your users.

On my end, I use Live Messenger to stay in touch with various people who work at one my Web development clients. I use Live Mesh to sync files and documents across my different PCs. And I sometimes use Photo Gallery to do quick and dirty image editing when I don’t need the power of Adobe Photoshop or Fireworks.

Beyond those tools, Live Essentials 2011 offers Windows Live Mail, which small businesses might consider as an alternative to the more expensive and more feature-filled Outlook. Those of you who edit videos at work may find Windows Live Movie Maker of value. And, if you maintain a blog for your company, you could take Windows Live Writer out for a spin.

Among the Live Essentials tools that I use, I depend on Live Mesh the most as I typically juggle three different PCs—a desktop and two notebooks—and need to make sure my core documents and files are stored and in sync on all three. So I thought I’d focus on that tool for now.

The new Windows Live Mesh 2011 combines the peer-to-peer file syncing of Microsoft’s (News - Alert) Live Sync tool with the online syncing of the previous Live Mesh utility. You can sync files among multiple PCs as well as with your SkyDrive storage space. Microsoft allocates 5GB of space for synced files in addition to the 25GB of space you already get for SkyDrive. So it’s a handy option if you ever need to access documents from someone else’s PC or just want to use SkyDrive as a backup for important files.

Setting up Live Mesh can be a bit time-consuming since you have to install the software on each PC that you wish to sync and then choose which folders to sync. Microsoft also forces you to bounce between your local Live Mesh window and your online Windows Live Devices page to perform different functions, which can get a bit confusing. But once your network is set up, the hard work is done.

I did find one limitation with Live Mesh. If you save a Microsoft Office document directly to your SkyDrive storage space, you can open it with Microsoft’s Office Web Apps software to view and edit the file online. But if you sync a document to SkyDrive through Live Mesh, you can’t open it with Office Web Apps—you can only save it to your PC or edit it using a local copy of Word or Excel. Microsoft confirmed the limitation for this release of Live Mesh, so perhaps a future version will let you open synced documents in Web Apps.

One improvement in the new Live Mesh is that it can use your local WiFi (News - Alert) connection to sync files across different PCs rather than doing it over the Internet. For this reason, I’ve found file syncing typically faster than it was in Live Sync.

You can download Windows Live Mesh 2011 from Microsoft’s Download Center. The software will run under Windows Vista, Windows 7, Windows Server 2008, and even Mac OS X 10.5 or higher. But those of you still using Windows XP are out of luck. Like the other Live Essentials tools and Microsoft’s upcoming Internet Explorer 9, Live Mesh 2011 won’t run under XP.