The Limits of the Limitless Live Mesh

According to Microsoft, although the potential of Live Mesh is limitless, the cloud platform does have boundaries, especially in its current form. Introduced in April 2008, Live Mesh is a project developed under the new Software plus Services strategy of the Redmond company, a direction imposed by Ray Ozzie after taking the title of Chief Software Architect from Microsoft Chairman Bill Gates. Live Mesh is a project designed to deliver centralized management across unified applications, data and devices. Still, there are limits to where the end users can stretch the cloud platform, as Live Mesh is available just as a Technology Preview, and is yet far from reaching the finish line.

"The potential of Live Mesh is limitless... but today's implementation is not," revealed a member of the Live Mesh team. "Our underlying platform is designed to enable a wide range of scenarios, at broad Internet scale. We closely watch the feedback from our Technology Preview users along with the health and performance of the service, using it to continually improve the system and ramp up our scale."

At this point in time Live Mesh offers support for no more than 100 devices per user. At the same time a single user can have just 200 Live Folders, and there is a limit of 200 members for each Live Folder. Microsoft indicated that no more than 100,000 items, either files or folders, can be placed inside a Live Folder, with the individual size of items no larger than 2 GB. In addition, the content of a Live Folder cannot surpass 10 GB, but even so, users will only be able to synchronize a maximum of 5GB with the Live Desktop.

"We'll expect these numbers to keep going up with subsequent service updates. These are not limits that are hard coded into the system. They are boundary guidelines we've established based on internal and external feedback, and we're confident that anything under these boundaries will work well for all users. Because they are not hard coded limits, you can exceed these boundaries, and at that point your mileage may vary," the Live Mesh team representative added.