The new tool providing this functionality is the latest version of the Outlook Connector public beta. This downloadable software works to sync Outlook's calendar with Windows Live Hotmail's Calendar with the Windows Live Calendar Beta. Such an integrated offering is a surprise considering that Microsoft is a company that's sometimes known for launching what are perceived as too-similar, parallel solutions (think FolderShare, SyncToy, SkyDrive, Mesh).

The previous version of this connector allowed you to sync email and contacts data between Outlook and Hotmail for free, but calendar sync required a subscription service. With this new version, however, calendar sync is now free and it includes the ability to work with Live Calendar beta. And because Live Calendar also supports calendar sharing, those shared calendars will sync back to Outlook, too.

For someone who uses an Outlook calendar at work, keeps a personal calendar in Hotmail, and perhaps has a shared family calendar in Live Calendar, this new sync tool will be incredibly useful. Whether you're online or offline, all your calendars are available from one place: Outlook.

The release of this connector is a great example of Microsoft's firm commitment to their S+S (Software + Services) architecture. They intend for software to be the hub for your activities with web services available as an additional layer. S+S combines the power of the internet with the richness that is still, as of today, found mostly in desktop software (although web software is quickly closing that gap). This is an entirely different mindset than what Google and other web companies are offering - in fact, it's just the opposite. Google Calendar, for example, will be implementing Google Gears which is software that makes a web app available offline and then syncs your changes when you connect to the internet again. The battle between these two similar, but opposing, methodologies will play out over the coming months. The ReadWriteWeb audience of early adopters and web developers tends to think the winner will be web apps in the end, but the truth of the matter is that it's still too early in the game for either side to declare victory just yet.

Of course, the missing piece to the Microsoft solution is the fact that Outlook (or any) desktop software isn't necessarily available on every PC that you own. However, considering their new Live Mesh platform isn't designed to just handle file sync, but is designed to handle application sync too, it's easy to see what direction they're headed. Microsoft is still betting on software - they're just using the web as a tool which makes everything work together more seamlessly than it did before .

Do you think S+S is a viable solution for computing's future? Or do you think today's web apps should be focused on implementing offline sync? Or can these two opposing agendas co-exist? Let us know your thoughts in the comments.

Allowing users to bypass the Live Mesh online storage by directly copying files from one machine to another is a major enhancement to Live Mesh. 5GB are not a very large amount of storage anymore, especially if you want to share videos or photos. Bypassing the Live Desktop of course means that those files are not available online from anywhere anymore, but for a lot of usage scenarios (backup, syncing between desktop and laptop etc.), the online storage wasn't really necessary anyway. Still, it would be nice to see Microsoft up the 5GB limit, or allow users to purchase more space.

Strangely, users will have to turn of syncing to the Live Desktop on the Live Desktop itself. It is not possible to directly configure a folder to bypass the Live Desktop from the desktop, which might have some technical reasons, but mostly seems like an unnecessary hassle.

The new version of Live Mesh will also allow users to manage potential file conflicts on the Live Desktop, something that was sorely missing before.

Going Mobile

Microsoft also quietly released a mobile version of Live Mesh, which allows users to access their files from their mobile phones or any other Internet connected device through an optimized site. While it works best on Windows Mobile phones, we have tested it out on the iPhone as well, and found that it worked surprisingly well. The iPhone displays all photos and documents, though it doesn't play back mp3 files. The site feel a bit better integrated on a Windows Mobile device (you can upload files to Mesh from the phone, for example), but it works well on other mobile platforms as well.

This is not, however, the promised mobile client for Live Mesh - it is only a way to access your files more conveniently from a mobile device. The mobile client is still 'coming soon.'

Going Mac Soon?

As if all of these updates weren't enough, the enterprising folks over at the Live Side blog today found a Mac version of the Mesh client on Microsoft's servers (though Microsoft promptly took it down). While this wasn't an official release, it is clear that Microsoft is taking the Mac platform seriously in its Mesh strategy and chances are that we will see an official Mac client in the near future.

Lots of Developments

Microsoft is putting a lot of resources behind its Live Mesh platform. It's good to see that the company is releasing so many updates and upgrades in such a short time. The syncing application is only the beginning of what Microsoft could do with Mesh and they surely have greater plans for it than just making it a glorified syncing app, of which Microsoft already has a few anyway.

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Some of Google's competitors such as Zimbra or Zoho are already offering some of these capabilities based on Google Gears. MySpace, too, is working on making its messaging platform available offline using Gears.

As Alex Chitu from the Google Operating System blog observes, Google's support for SyncML is also noteworthy. SyncML is an open standard for synchronizing information between different devices and, so far, has mostly been adopted by the mobile phone industry, with all the major companies such as Motorola, Nokia, Sony, LG, as well as IBM and Siemens supporting it in at least some of their products.

The latest version of SyncML has added support for push email. According to Andrew Fogg, Google is using SyncML for synchronizing its contacts database with the iPhone, but in the long run, it is probably worth speculating if Google might also start pushing email to the iPhone (or any other phone for that matter), using the SyncML push technology.

Essentially, Live Mesh is a collection of feeds (which can be expressed as ATOM, JSON, FeedSync, RSS, WB-XML, or POX). Every piece of data entered into a user's Mesh -- be it a file, a folder, a message, a user permission, or a new device -- is rendered as a piece of information in a feed. The feeds are then synced with other devices that are part of that Mesh following rules for how to sync each particular piece of information (i.e., File A may sync with Users 1, 2, and 3, while File B may only be told to sync with Users 1 and 2).

Mesh is a combination of web based services that sync files and information across a cloud environment, and client software that allows individual devices to sync with the Mesh. This is a continuation of Microsoft's "software plus services" strategy, in which client software is augmented by (or reliant upon) web services.

The News Feed

While Mesh doesn't have any version control capabilities yet -- a must for a service that syncs data between multiple users -- it does borrow a popular feature from the web for keeping users up-to-date on what's going on across a system: the news feed. The Live Mesh Notifier is a news feed of all the activity on a user's Mesh. Right now that means changes made to files, folders, devices, user permissions, and comments left on files/folders.

However, because Live Mesh is a platform that seeks to interact with third party services (more on that below), it is easy to envision how much more could be pushed through the news feed. We were shown a demo application that synced tweets on Twitter with the Mesh Notifier, for example. As more services use the Live Mesh platform, could it, or a service built on top of it, eat FriendFeed's lunch?

The Platform

What makes Live Mesh potentially very special is that Microsoft has turned synchronization into a platform. Eventually, services as well as devices will be able to hook into Mesh. We were shown some early demos of the type of things Microsoft envisions for the Mesh service that were quite impressive. In one proof-of-concept demo, a photo that was taken via a cell phone camera, was automatically synced to a Mesh that pushed the pictures out to a Facebook photo album.

It was certainly impressive to see data -- in this case a cell phone camera picture -- almost instantly synced across multiple devices and saved to a web service immediately after it was created. Microsoft envisions Mesh as a platform for data synchronization for any service we use and for any type of data. Ideally, for example, if someone were to comment on that photo at Facebook, the comment would sync to anywhere else that photo was hosted (your desktop computer, the desktop computers of anyone sharing the photo, your laptop, other photo sharing sites, etc.).

Taking On Google Gears?

Perhaps the most interesting bit that Microsoft demoed to us was an offline compontent of the Mesh platform. Web apps using the Mesh platform will be able to lean on the client software to take their web applications offline, including all user data, and sync it up when the user gets back online at a later time.

Microsoft is taking an offline approach that is more akin to Google Gears or Mozilla Prism than Adobe AIR -- the web-to-desktop functionality of Mesh is essentially a wrapper for the actual web app. The same HTML and JavaScript, etc. runs in a desktop window in offline mode, data is stored locally, and synced later. The difference is that Microsoft is ting offline access into the Mesh service, so developers don't just get the technology to take their apps offline, but also access to the synchronization and cloud storage services to move their data back and forth.

We've talked about the importance of web apps on the desktop on this blog, so this could be an important component of Mesh.

Will It Work?

It is still very early for Mesh. Microsoft intends to invite key development partners to try out the system in the next few weeks, and will roll out support for other devices (including mobile and Mac) over the next year. One thing that could hinder Mesh, though, is Microsoft's rather confused marketing around its online services. Between Mesh, SkyDrive, Live Spaces, and FolderShare there is so much overlap in Microsoft's services that users are bound to get confused.

Ideally, Mesh will be a platform that will tie all of Microsoft's online storage, synchronization, and sharing services together -- along with other, third party services. But the confusing muddle that is Microsoft Live could stymie mainstream adoption. Microsoft needs to clean up their act and present a more clear marketing message.

Software + services is also a potentially tougher sell than software as a service -- people don't like downloading things. Still, Microsoft has created a compelling product that they hope will standardize synchronization across the universe of devices and web services we each use every day. The prospect of getting easy access to user data on multiple devices could be attractive for developers and prompt them to embrace the platform, but it is probably too early to make any specific predictions.

Ray Ozzie Memo

Accompanying the launch of Live Mesh is a new memo from Microsoft Chief Software Architect, Ray Ozzie. It notes that Microsoft sees the Web as "the Hub of our social mesh and our device mesh." Ozzie calls this "social mesh" and writes that "in scenarios ranging from productivity to media and entertainment, social mesh notions of linking, sharing, ranking and tagging will become as familiar as File, Edit and View."

UPDATE: here is the full text of Ray Ozzie's memo

Collaboration on documents may be a part of the product as well. It's expected to be a simple, but powerful, service. A number of questions remain, however.

Ray Ozzie offered thinly veiled foreshadowing of Mesh at the Mix08 conference and described a product that offered the following:

"Just imagine the possibilities enabled by centralized configuration and personalization and remote control of all your devices from just about anywhere. Just imagine the convenience of unified data management, the transparent synchronization of files, folders, documents, and media. The bi-directional synchronization of arbitrary feeds of all kinds across your devices and the Web, a kind of universal file synch."

Questions Remaining

Performance seems to be the biggest question around Live Mesh. The technology itself doesn't seem terribly unique, but if the program is able to deal with file editing conflicts and lost network connections, that will be good.

Storage size and allocation is another question that remains. It's assumed that SkyDrive will be central to the offering, but that program's 5MB 5 GB (Ha! typo) storage limit will need to change. Even double that will not likely be enough storage.

Finally, some magic previously unimagined would be nice. When Ozzie says, "Just imagine the possibilities enabled..." I can imagine that he's imagined some we haven't. What's up their sleeve?

Cross-platform functionality outside of the Windows environment may be a pipe-dream, but even so - Mesh could be a game changer for the majority of the world using said environment.

What would you like to see out of Live Mesh?