PDC 2005: Microsoft makes it easier to work together

Microsoft unveiled a demo of a new technology at PDC today.  Called "People Near Me", it lets people share files and session displays (like remote desktop) with minimal hassle.

Anyone who's ever had a friend visit who they want to give a file to probably uses a USB drive or something.  With People Near Me, you would just pop up an MSN IM like window and drop sessions and files to them.

"People Near Me" was demoed and seems useful and yet so obvious that one wonders why this wasn't in there before. In the demo, two Microsoft employees were able to work together quickly without having to set up a bunch of shares. Instead, person A invites Person B who is "near them" into the People Near me applet. Then Person A drags and drops the Power Point app onto the share window and the other user can instantly see what that app is displaying. Then he dragged and dropped the actual PowerPoint file to enable the other user to be able to edit it. Edits on the file were instantly synchronized.

For developers, Indigo may be the "big thing". Anyone who's done network code in Windows XP knows how much of a pain it can be. Indigo seems to make this a much more streamlined experience. One Microsoft keynote speaker said "Developers no longer need to feel like plumbers."