I managed to convince some of my co-workers to start using Live Mesh as a lightweight collaboration tool.  The experience has been interesting so far.  We’re all  working with one shared folder at the moment.  Since the features are pretty limited in the preview that’s about the best we can do.

One of the first things that really surprised me was how limited it is at understanding what’s going on with a document that is being “shared.”  For example we’re all working on one Excel document.  A real simple list of information.  If two or more of us have it open, then who ever saves it last overwrites the version.  The history in the News section can be a little delayed at times while things sync so it’s not always obvious that someone else is editing the document. 

I was happy to see that the service did notice an issue and gave me a chance to save my version with a different name.  But it seemed to take a couple of minutes before I saw the notification in the right hand Mesh bar.  I’ll see if I can re-create it so I can get some screen caps.

I can’t wait until there is better application integration.  It would have been super nice to let me know that some else had it open still.  And better yet notified me in the app that it had changed.  Most of the office apps have a merge features built in.

I’d also like to see a way to share areas of a document.  For example, in Excel, it would be cool to define a Mesh enabled range of fields and allow for real time sharing of those fields.  So that when someone else updates them, I could except the change and see it in my working document.  Same could be true in Word.  Then it would be like SubEthaEdit only with all the features of Word.

I’d like to talk about the News feature of Mesh next, but I think I’m going to keep that as an entry of it’s own.  I have a lot to say about it.