Kurt Shintaku's Blog

Windows Live Messenger V8 ships with Shared Folders.  (Get it from http://messenger.live.com)

 

What does it do?

Shared Folders allows you to create a group of Windows Live Messenger users and collectively share a group of files.  These files are replicated to each person’s PCs enabling people to share a "virtual file share" over the Internet using Microsoft’s Peer-to-Peer (P2P) technology. 

 

How does it work?

Shared folders supports a replication model between 2 messenger clients – however there can be more than 2 people using a shared folder… it just means that the replication will need to take place again for each additional person sharing the folder.  This can be from ANY Messenger user’s machine that has the current files available to replicate.  

 

The underlying replicator technology is File Replication Services v2, which was implemented by the Windows Server R2 team, and repackaged by the Messenger team.  This is an advanced replication technology usually not found on desktops that enables byte-level differencing between sharing workstations:  In other words, if there is a 5MB Word document being shared amongst several individuals, if one person edits the large 5MB Word document, only the "changed bytes" will be transmitted to the other partners to update them, instead of sending each of them the entire 5MB file all over again.

 

Before you ask, NO it does not "swarm" to leverage multipoint transfers in the same way that BitTorrent does – you will see that in other technologies.  Using multipoint file transfer technology doesn’t make sense in this model because the goal of the technology is to allow people to not only continually share files but also to constantly make changes to those files.  Databases, pictures, Excel spreadsheets, etc.

 

Either client can contribute/modify to the shared folder.  You can put folders and large files into the shared folder.  It supports an invite model for establishing a secure sharing relationship so not just any uninvited Tom Dick or Harry can access your personal information.

 

When and if possible, the bit transfers will go P2P.  We recommend that people get uPNP capable routers at home.  They work great (VOIP, P2P file transfers, my slingbox for watching US TiVo from the road, etc.).

 

We will continue to develop and enhance shared folders so stay tuned for extensions of this technology to group/circle sharing and self-sharing.

Windows XP Service Pack 1 will NOT have Security Patches made for it as of October 10th, 2006.  Did you get that?  If you are running WinXP SP1, you will NOT get any security patches, any fixes, anything at all… once October 10th comes and goes.

 

Folks, it doesn’t matter if you call Microsoft Product Support and pay for a security incident call.

It doesn’t matter if you have a Premier Support agreement with ‘extended lifecycle support’.

It doesn’t matter if you really, really, really need security patches just for one more month and you say "pretty please with sugar on top".

 

There will be no security patches made available to you via download off of any of the following:

– download.microsoft.com

– update.microsoft.com

– premier.microsoft.com

 

As you may have read on http://www.microsoft.com/windows/support/endofsupport.mspx, we have something called "Custom Support Agreements available for purchase by Enterprise customers with Premier Support and a lot of dispoable cash laying around in huge piles that would rather pay an extra $100,000+ above and beyond their normal support contract to get security patch support for one extra year rather than upgrade their desktops to Service Pack 2.  (Yes, I’ve heard it’s that expensive)

 

To those of you reading this, you do not fall into this category, I assure you.  In fact, in the history of Microsoft, I have never actually met a customer that has paid for this.  The funds spent on the extra ‘custom support agreement’ over an organization’s Premier Support agreement could otherwise be spent testing and upgrading to Service Pack 2 instead.

 

What’s more, it’s not like Windows XP is going to disappear over night.  Windows XP will be the N-1 older-supported OS from Microsoft for quite a while after Windows Vista’s release and there will be untold numbers of products that will run on Windows XP and will require SP2 at the very least.  Every organization supports two revisions of operating systems… and when Windows Vista releases, Windows 2000 will go "out of support" within a year or so and you will still be supporting Windows XP in some form for a very long time.

 

Choosing to not upgrade to SP2 in the hopes of "skipping" SP2 for Windows Vista is an unwise IT choice.