Hasta La Gadget!

This article was written on May 12, 2007 by CyberNet.

After Microsoft’s last slip-up we knew that Windows Live Folders would probably be coming soon, and the service was available for a short period of time earlier today. Luckily Chris over at LiveSide managed to sneak in fast enough to snap some screenshots of what the service is going to offer.

The Windows Live Folders service obviously focuses on making it easy to share your documents with others, or keep them private so that you’re the only one who has access to them. Chris also provided a nice summary of the different types of folder sharing:

Personal

• Use personal folders to back up important files that are only for you.
• Get to your files from any computer with Internet access by signing in with your Windows Live ID.

Shared

• Shared folders make it easy to collaborate with coworkers or classmates.
• You decide how much control each person has over each shared folder. Some can just read what’s there: others can add and delete files.
• Everyone who is sharing uses their own Windows Live ID.

Public

• With public folders, anyone on the Internet can view your files, but they can’t change them.
• Want to show your public files to others? Just send them a link! Each folder and file has its own web address.

I haven’t been able to tinker with the service myself because it was pulled down so fast, but looking at the screenshots that Chris provides I would say that the service is fairly intuitive. Take a look at how you do some things on Windows Live Folders:

Note: Click any of the screenshots to make them bigger.

Creating a folder is just a click away:

Mange who has access to each of the folders:

Do a lot more with the folders:

As of right now the service is only showing 250MB of storage, but when it is officially launched to the public it is supposed to offer 500MB. I was expecting to see the storage hit at least 1GB, but more like 2GB to 5GB. So the quota is a little disappointing, and they even limit filesizes to about 50MB each. I think most geeks will be holding out for a service with larger amounts of storage since Box.net offers 1GB and AOL’s Xdrive offers 5GB for free.

Does this look like something you would use? Both Internet Explorer and Firefox are supported in case that will influence your decision.

This will be the homepage of Windows Live Folders

See more screenshots over at LiveSide

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