Category: Imported

Looks like there’s a ton of WHS news trickling out of WinHEC.  New OEMs that were announced include Gateway, Acer, LaCie, and Medion.  It looks like the licensing plans are firming up to include a System Builder option (Like OEM licenses for MCE) but that there will not be a retail SKU.

Lots of Software partner announcements as well.  The most interesting in my opinion is the SageTV integration.  Basically you can pump all your media to your Home Server, including PVR functionality, and use simple extenders to deliver your content anywhere. I’m not sure if SageTV allows for live tv watching, but it’d be awesome to move to a model where the only TV tuners in the home were connected to the Home Server, and all your channels and saved content were available to any TV, PC, or portable device.

Microsoft also announced a coding contest to encourage innovative add-in / add-ons for Windows Home Server.  I’ve seen many Microsoft coding contests get very few entries in the past.  So if you’ve got some spare time on your hands, it might be worth pulling something together to submit.  They have some pretty decent prizes in the mix.

More details can be found in Microsoft’s press release.

Just read about a very unlucky/lucky occurance where Microsoft’s Josh Ledgard managed to avoid major injury, but crunched a bike and suffered some scrapes and bumps due to the carelessness of a motorist. 

More and more folks are taking advantage of the nice weather by biking to work, and motorists need to remember that we need to share the road properly, and stay alert.  A 150 lb cyclists on a bike is no match for a 3,000 pound car or 5,000+ pound SUV, and Josh is lucky to have come out as well as he did.

If you want to read the harrowing account, head over to Josh’s blog.  And if you live in the Seattle/Redmond area, be on the look out for a dented “older, dark red, Nissan or Honda, with a huge dent in the right front passenger door”, since the driver left the scene of the accident.

Just got an email from Connect this evening announcing the availability of build 06.00.1371.  From a quick read it looks like it’s going to be possible to upgrade from the Beta 2 build.  There are lots of warnings about making sure that all of your data is backed up, and this is a great opportunity to remind everyone that WHS should NOT be the only place you are keeping your important files.  I use FolderShare to sync all of my important data to a partition on one of my clients (you can exclude this folder from your backup configuration to avoid overly large backups).

I’m downloading the new build now.  Can’t wait to see what has changed (going to go look at the release notes now…)

Charlie Kindel posted on the WHS blog announcing the availability of the SDK for Windows Home Server.  I did a quick read through and it looks like they’re allowing you to extend the platform in many different ways.  Pretty much every UI element is extendable: the WHS console, notifications & alerts, etc.  It also looks like you can peek and poke at almost everything WHS does with backups, hard disks & client computers.

We’ll probably see some trivial demos pop up relatively soon, and more complex stuff coming out in the coming months.  I’m real curious to see what scenarios developers will choose to tackle first.

A question for Charlie and the rest of the WHS team:  Are you setting up a gallery or some sort of marketplace for folks to post/share their WHS projects?  I’m thinking something similar to the way the Live.com folks have their Gadget Gallery.

In my last post, I talked about how third parties are likely to be the ones to make or break Windows Home Server in the marketplace.  Here’s a few ideas that I’m hoping someone will bring to the table when WHS is released:

• Family Sharing – Basically, I’d like to select certain folders on the server, and designate them to be replicated to my extended family.  Hopefully they’ll all have Home Server machines as well, and now if I drop some home movies or photos into that bucket, they’d be automatically synced.  Likewise they could add stuff as well.  This can be set up today with Foldershare, but it needs to be simple and available through the WHS console.
• Security Monitoring and Automation – This is one that I think will probably get addressed at least a couple different ways.  If I’m away from the house, I’d love to be able to remotely access my security system.  Maybe flip a couple lights on/off. Remotely access security cameras.  Turn the thermostat back up so the house isn’t too cold when I return.
• Offsite backup – I’d like to see this addressed two different ways.  One would be a web-based service where I could pay for a certain amount of space on a monthly basis.  Another way that I think would be awesome is if I could designate a remote WHS machine (maybe at my brother’s house) as my remote backup point.  I could just buy a 500GB USB hard drive, he could plug it in to his machine and designate it for remote backups, or perhaps he could just have an easy way to set a quota for my remote backups, and it would make use of the storage pool that WHS manages.
• Amazon UnBox or similar clients – Let me browse and buy from the server, either from the remote web interface or the console, and then let me watch the content on any media extenders in my home.  I could schedule the download remotely early in the day, and then it would be ready to watch on whatever TV was free in the evening (assuming it had a media extender attached.)
• Family Schedule – This is getting into the email/pim realm a bit, and I know that story isn’t fully addressed, but a centralized shared calendar view would be cool.  Let me sync any type of calendar to the Home Server, Live Hotmail, Google Calendar, Outlook, whatever.  Somehow make the calendar viewable on media extenders, or on home PCs in an easy, quick way.

What other unfullfilled needs are out there waiting to be addressed?