I’m surprised how many people aren’t familiar or using Mesh yet. I’ve found Mesh to be one of the coolest and most useful things I’ve started using in a while. For me, Mesh does two things, and does them very well.

First, it allows you to create a “shared” folder across multiple machines as well as a Web desktop. For instance, I created a folder called “SharePoint Utilities” where i keep the small apps and PowerShell scripts I use on all my SharePoint tools like SharePoint Manager 2007, the Content Deployment Wizard, Reflector, SPDiposeCheck and other stuff. I’ve got Mesh installed on my laptop, my backup workstation VM and all my SharePoint dev machines. When I update one of the utilities or add something to the shared folder that’s in Mesh, within a few seconds all the other machines get updated (or the next time they get connected).

You can use it just for your own stuff, but another thing you can do is to invite others into the folder. So, in my case people I work with on a day to day basis are spread across different locations… different cities, states and countries. But with all of us using on shared folder, it’s like we were in the same office with a shared drive or something like that. Plus, I get to choose which machines Mesh will be added to. If one of us deletes a file, the file is deleted from everyone’s Mesh. This last point seems to be the one that escapes most people… if you delete it, everyone else’s will get deleted as well.

The other really cool aspect is that when you install Mesh, you’ll have the ability to jump on any of the other machines in your Mesh, or machines you’ve installed Mesh on and joined to your account. So you have RDP, but the best part: you don’t even need open ports or any of that jazz to get a clean RDP access… awesome!

Best part about Mesh: it’s a free service provided by Microsoft. One you should certainly check out.