Wednesday, December 3, 2008

Goodbye FolderShare, Welcome Live Sync

So now we have Live Sync, Mesh and SkyDrive with some common overlap of functionality. Pick and chose. I found this post.

Over the past three years Ozzie has been trying to change the culture of the company to one where Microsoft behaves more like a startup.  In start-up mode, free from the politics and cross-team collaboration, Microsoft’s many product teams are able to innovate much faster, delivering more useful, game changing products and services.

It explains this “confusion” to be thanks to Ray Ozzie and I can agree that it makes some sense.

Ozzie spent a lot of time crafting a different kind of work environment at Microsoft. "He was very intentional about getting stuff done quickly, focusing on the end customer," Treadwell says. Previously, a big part of any development team at Microsoft was making sure its new product worked in lockstep with everything else the company produced. This "unification" criterion was something that Gates had always hammered on. But Ozzie saw that while that approach avoided annoying conflicts, it also tended to smother innovation in the cradle. "This philosophy of independent innovation—really making progress before you pursue serious integration, is something Ray pushed very strongly," Treadwell says. Ozzie's approach was to encourage people to rush ahead and build things. Then he'd have a team of what he calls the spacklers fill in the gaps and get things ready for release.  - Wired

Microsoft the new startup.

I got this email as I’ve used FolderShare.

Dear FolderShare user,
We're contacting you to let you know what's next for FolderShare, and to make you aware of some important changes.
In December, we plan to announce a product called Windows Live Sync. You can think of it as FolderShare 2.0. It's going to look familiar and offer the same great features, plus:

  • More folders and files—sync up to 20 folders with 20,000 files each.
  • Integration with Windows Live ID—no more extra sign-in stuff to remember.
  • Integration with the Recycle Bin—no more separate Trash folder to fiddle with.
  • Unicode support—sync files in other languages.

A huge part of Sync's success story depends on FolderShare users like you. When Sync releases, FolderShare goes into retirement. That means your FolderShare software will stop working and will ask you to upgrade to Sync. Once you do, Sync will automatically rebuild your personal folders. We expect a lot of new users when Sync is released, so if you can't sign in right away, please give it a little time.
Here's the part you need to pay attention to: Sync will not be able to rebuild your shared libraries. If you have a lot of shared libraries, you should hop over to the FolderShare website while it's still available and copy all that information. You'll need it to rebuild your shared libraries in Sync.
Thanks for being a FolderShare user! We're excited about delivering an even better file-synchronization experience to customers like you. We hope you'll come along as we move forward with Windows Live Sync.
Sincerely,
The Windows Live Sync (formerly FolderShare) team

Also via the FolderShare blog

1 comment:

  1. I also used Foldershare before.
    But then I found this product: Hamachi.cc It creates a virtual computer-computer VPN tunnell with very good security. It works like P2P and thus you can always reach the other computer like a chat client, or by normal SMB (file-connection).

    I then use a robocopy script for syncing files like I previously used FolderShare for. This has no limitations and is completely free (for private use). I highly recommend it instead of using a service that is limited in number of files and folders.

    ReplyDelete