.Google tend to get most of the buzz (no pun intended) around the “Cloud”and Microsoft tend to be seen as a company who are being dragged kicking and screaming in that direction. As a Gmail user I am as guilty as anyone of this,indeed I even commit the ultimate indignity to Microsoft by POPing my Hotmail into Gmail.
However I have had Hotmail for much longer than Gmail and have seen it go through many changes in terms of positioning. What I hadn’t until recently realised is that behind the revamping to MSN and then to Live,Microsoft have actually added something pretty good. I’m talking about 25Gb of free storage in SkyDrive. I will assume from this point onward that you already have a Windows Live ID via Hotmail,MSN or Live and therefore access to SkyDrive!I use DropBox on every computer I can but the 2Gb available in the free option is a limiting factor and the paid for versions in my opinion ramp up a little too steeply. But there all along I had 25Gb of storage sat waiting to be used. And that of course would still be the case because as is their way Microsoft have made using SkyDrive a pretty horrible experience.
If they had any sense what they would do in Windows 7 is have a Control Panel setting to mount SkyDrive but no,they don’t want to make it that easy. I will at this point save you the trouble of reading any further if you want to use SkyDrive a la DropBox by pointing you to Live Mesh which allows you to sync up folders on a range of devices (I have Mac and PC sync’d in this way) and works I have to say very well. The one issue I do have is that it won’t allow me to select a network share are as Sync folder but that’s for another post.
However,if you can’t be bothered to investigate Mesh and just want to use Explorer to access your files on SkyDrive as you would on any other drive,local or networked,then up until now you had to rely on a 3rd party app such as Gladinet. This costs money and part of me thinks this defeats the object of using the free storage. Now through Office 2010 and Windows 7 there is a way,tortuous I admit,to get around the problem. Although I’m specifying Windows 7 here it should be possible to do this in earlier versions but there is the problem with credentials on Live not matching your Windows credentials. Before we start therefore we should address this.
Windows 7 has a quite well hidden feature that allows you to link online credentials to a local account. OK so at the moment this only seems to support Live IDs but it’s the thought that counts! This particular setting is hidden in the User Accounts and Family Safety->User Accounts section of the Control Panel.
On my test install I had to first download and install a LiveID plugin but this was linked from the Add Online ID Provider link seen above. Once installed and linked Windows 7 can use the LiveID where appropriate to save retyping credentials over and over again. If you use a decent password this will be appreciated.
Next in an Office 2010 app,I’m using Word in this example,select the File menu and look for the option that says Save &Send and once selected the Save to Web option.
This will give you access to your SkyDrive folders. Select the folder you want to use as your root (I haven’t found a way of using the SkyDrive root for this as yet) and then click the Save As button. This will bring a familiar dialog box to the fore. In the address bar there is now the path to the folder in your SkyDrive that you have selected and this is what we need to capture by right clicking the bar and selecting Copy Address As Text.
We can now cancel out of this and in fact close Word (or whatever app you chose) altogether. Next bring up the Computer from the start menu and select the Map Network Drive option form the bar. Choose a drive letter that you want to use and then paste the address into the bar like so;
Select the Reconnect at Logon option to make it available all the time.
Now you have a drive linking to the SkyDrive folder. I use it with SyncToy 2.0 to quickly backup some of my files as and when I need to rather than the constant sync of Mesh.
Epilogue: The fact that Microsoft have a potentially winning proposition in the “Cloud”market but fail to capitalise on it is a symptom of their overall confused approach. SkyDrive offers what people have been saying a “GDrive”should have and yet garners next to no coverage or indeed push from them,they also make it as difficult as possible to make it usable for “normal”users. They have a great proposition in Mesh which they also fail to push. Yes it’s in beta but so is most of Google’s technology. Gmail was in beta for years! With Office 2010 Web Apps coming to Live soon one can only hope that Microsoft finally get a coherent position established because they genuinely do have the basis of a compelling product suite. Whether they can monetize is another question and that ultimately might be the problem.
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