Monday, October 10, 2005
Windows Vista Sync Center: Some Background
Posted by Jason Dunn in "THOUGHT" @ 08:00 AM
The following information is what I received from Microsoft's PR people when I asked about Vista's Sync Center:
"Over the past few years, the number of devices and data sources that customers connect to their computers has exploded. Corporate customers are more often using offline folders as well as datacentric devices, such as PDAs or cell phones, and home users have rapidly adopted digital media devices, smartphones, and connected hard drives. Today, there is no easy user experience to manage all these individual sync relationships, and users are tasked with many different sync experiences depending on the device or data source. Windows Vista unifies the sync experience across data sources and devices with the new Sync Center. The new interface will enable users to initiate a manual sync, stop an in-progress sync, see the status of current sync activities, and receive notifications to resolve conflicts.
[click image for full-sized version]
It is important to understand that this tool provides customers with a unifying user experience only for synchronization. It does not subsume third-party sync functionality or infrastructure, but rather complements it. For example, Pocket PCs will still use the ActiveSync for physically synchronizing the data between a Windows Vista computer and a Pocket PC device, but the user can now go to one place in the system to manage that relationship alongside any other sync relationships. To change the granular sync settings for each relationship, Sync Center simply directs the user to the Microsoft or third-party device and data-management settings infrastructure. Certain components of Sync Center are present in the Beta 1 Windows Vista build. Other elements will appear in later builds."
I was hoping we'd see the death of Activesync on the desktop and instead a new unified Vista sync client, but that doesn't seem to be the case. Regardless, this will be an improvement over the decentralized user interface that we have now, so I welcome it!
"Over the past few years, the number of devices and data sources that customers connect to their computers has exploded. Corporate customers are more often using offline folders as well as datacentric devices, such as PDAs or cell phones, and home users have rapidly adopted digital media devices, smartphones, and connected hard drives. Today, there is no easy user experience to manage all these individual sync relationships, and users are tasked with many different sync experiences depending on the device or data source. Windows Vista unifies the sync experience across data sources and devices with the new Sync Center. The new interface will enable users to initiate a manual sync, stop an in-progress sync, see the status of current sync activities, and receive notifications to resolve conflicts.
[click image for full-sized version]
It is important to understand that this tool provides customers with a unifying user experience only for synchronization. It does not subsume third-party sync functionality or infrastructure, but rather complements it. For example, Pocket PCs will still use the ActiveSync for physically synchronizing the data between a Windows Vista computer and a Pocket PC device, but the user can now go to one place in the system to manage that relationship alongside any other sync relationships. To change the granular sync settings for each relationship, Sync Center simply directs the user to the Microsoft or third-party device and data-management settings infrastructure. Certain components of Sync Center are present in the Beta 1 Windows Vista build. Other elements will appear in later builds."
I was hoping we'd see the death of Activesync on the desktop and instead a new unified Vista sync client, but that doesn't seem to be the case. Regardless, this will be an improvement over the decentralized user interface that we have now, so I welcome it!
