Digital Home Thoughts: Microsoft Re-Launches FolderShare

FolderShare is quite likely the best software service (free or paid) that you've never heard of - it's a service that synchronizes two folders. Seems simple right? The devil is always in the details where synchronization is concerned however - and FolderShare gets more of those details right than any similar software I've used. I use FolderShare to keep my Documents, Pictures, Music, and other folders synchronized amongst all my PCs. Between FolderShare and my hosted Exchange account, I can sit down at any of my PCs or laptops and have an updated copy of every file, email, and photo that I have. It's like the ultimate roving desktop scenario, and it works amazingly well. It also works well when you're working remotely, because if I'm working on a document or editing photos on the plane, when I land and establish Internet connectivity, all those updated files are pushed back, securely, to my home PCs. FolderShare has allowed me to mirror my data all over the place and worry less about losing any one PC because they all have the same data. That's powerful stuff.

FolderShare is in my top three applications of all time, and it's fantastic to see Microsoft finally make progress on it. You see, FolderShare was created by a company named Byte Taxi, and I was paying $59.99 a year for their professional-level service. Then Microsoft bought Byte Taxi at the end of 2005 - and nothing changed for over two years other than the service becoming free. By "nothing", I mean exactly that - no real software updates (in fact, some features were removed), no changes to the FolderShare Web site other than a Microsoft logo being slapped up...it was as if the whole project was frozen in carbonite. I'd been fortunate enough to connect with some of the Microsoft team members working on updating FolderShare, so I knew they were doing things behind the scenes, but it's been hard seeing no outward changes. All that's finally changed!



The new Web site looks great, and all of the functions that FolderShare users are familiar with are still there - just with a new look. You can access files on your remotely connected PCs, even those outside the shared folders, making this a handy way to grab anything off your PC. Performance on Vista-based machines has also been enhanced. There are so many interesting ways they can build upon FolderShare, and it looks like now that the back-end plumbing is in place, we'll start to see some forward motion on this software. And if you notice that it looks a lot like Windows Live Skydrive, that's probably not a coincidence.

And, finally, the FolderShare team has launched their own blog. Here's hoping 2008 is the year of FolderShare!