In my previous articles, I’ve listed of ways to get the best use out of Windows Live SkyDrive. This has consistently been one of the most read posts on my blog especially around using Gladinet to set up Live SkyDrive as a network drive on your computer.

Recently, a new product has come into Beta, that allows for the same level of functionality and allows the user to set up their SkyDrive account as a network drive without going through extended configuration steps that Gladinet takes us through.

In all fairness, connecting via Gladinet offers many more options such as connecting to other types of cloud storage at the same time (for example,  Google Picasa, Amazon S3 and Google Docs). SkyDrive Explorer only connects you to Live SkyDrive.

SkyDrive Explorer is a free product and is easy to use. It requires little to no configuration and allows the user to use their SkyDrive just like any other folder on their computer….

To install SkyDrive Explorer, go to http://www.skydriveexplorer.com and click on the Free Download menu.

Step 1

Download the setup via the download link and run through the steps to install the application:

When you hit Finish, the installer will close. At this point in time, there is no “executable file” that you need to run to start the application itself.

Step 2

Open up your “My Computer” and you’ll see the SkyDrive Explorer under the list of your “Other” drives:

Step 3

The first time you double-click on the icon, the following dialog box will show:

Put in your Live user details and hit Sign In

Step 4

Once authorized, your windows explorer will now show the contents of your SkyDrive account:

And that is pretty much it! Again, you can treat this just like any other windows folder and/or drive on your computer. The advantage of this drive is that it is stored on the cloud and so available wherever you go.

Warning

SkyDrive Explorer communicates with your SkyDrive account by HTML Web page parsing, which means that should Windows Live decide to change their content format, this application may not work any more. However, I’m sure that the SkyDrive Explorer folks will update regularly should any of their functionality gets disabled due to Live SkyDrive changes.