So, no sooner do I write the piece on sync and the piece on FolderShare than I find out about Dropbox.com. They're in private beta right now so you have to sign up to request an account and who knows how long it'll take to get one. Basic idea is similar to FolderShare. Drop by and play the flash demo that's on their front page.
Microsoft has made an updated beta available of their Windows Live FolderShare. It was announced in this entry of their FolderShare Live Spaces Blog (the whole FolderShare Live Spaces is here.
So, what it is? It's a service (free, right now, while it's in beta) that allows you to upload files to a central server and synch them between multiple computers. Right now, it's Mac and Windows only -- no mobile and no Linux, but I imagine at least the mobile part will be available sometime soon. You can also supposedly share public folders with friends or colleagues and there's even a web interface for it, although they say the web interface isn't as secure as the client you download -- communications with the client is encrypted with AES and uses SSL for communications.
I haven't been able to find much more information or reviews of it yet but I'm sure someone with more time available to them than me will be digging into it. Just quickly browsing their help I see that you can have up to 10 private libraries, each with up to 10,000 files, each file no larger than 2GB. Sounds like a LOT of storage to me and, since it's free right now, I imagine there's some other limit that I couldn't find.
This article from Microsoft Watch discusses the importance of Sync. I'm a geat believer in the power and utility of synchronization. Keeping information current across all of your information sources is crucial to being able to RELY on your data. And I believed in it even before I ran Internet Operations for Pumatech/Intellisync. When I had my first Palm Pilot I was at a loss to explain why more people didn't use these devices to keep their contacts and calendars with them. I was happy that I could synchronize my device with my desktop but, at the same time, I was quite unhappy with the fact that I had to cradle the device to do it.
Enough preaching, the REAL reason I'm writing this is to say that I think Nokia does, at some level, understand the importance of sync because they BOUGHT Intellisync who were the leaders in the entire synchronization market, owning something like 85% of it (I say "were" because I have no idea what their market share is nowadays).
One of our noble but failed efforts at Intellisync was Intellisync.com -- the great synchronization server in the sky (or the ether or whatever we called it back then). In 2001, we could synchronize your calendar, contacts, notes, tasks and email to your desktop(s), laptop(s), mobile phone(s), PDA(s), all via the Internet, wired or wireless. It was true multi-client, multi-platform synchronization and it was great because the "sync point in the sky" was the place to which everything synchronized. It was automatically maintained -- whenever anything that had or could make a connection to the Internet was connected to the Internet, it would sync. There was no question of which source contained the current "master". The effort failed back then, perhaps because the Internet bubble burst, perhaps because it wasn't marketed correctly, perhaps because it was a bit buggy (it never got out of beta), perhaps because the world wasn't ready for the service, but probably for a combination of the reasons listed as well as a few others that I haven't listed.
Now, 7 years later, we're finally getting back to realizing the need for sync. Let's hope we get it right this time.
This Computerworld article has a few good tips for PowerShell users but also has a good list of links and resources for those who haven't really used it much.
Information Week has this article about Vista virtualization which is useful mainly because of the links at the end of the story. I didn't know that Symantec had a Application Virtualization solution that's free for personal use.