Windows Home Server

Michael Gartenberg | August 22, 2007, 09:41 AM

I am so loving this product even on the generic white box I'm using it with. It's one of those things that you think you don't need until you start using and the more you use it, the more you wonder how you lived without it. The team over there at Redmond has been amazing with this. The betas were rock solid and worked well, the release version even better. At a time when it seems like Microsoft has a hard time shipping product, these folks delivered.

 There's a few things it does really well and unfortunately, a few quirks as well.

1. A terabyte of networked storage on my white box hardware that I can access from any PC (or Mac) in my home. It's great. It's simple and it works. If that's all it did, I would be happy but there's much more.

2. Fantastic PC backup, automatically. I love this. Every PC on the network is automatically backed up. It's scheduled and incremental so once the first backup is done, the rest is a snap. I purposely killed one of my machines that was backed up and it took less than 20 minutes to fully restore it. Wow.

3. Remote access. Not only can I access my server from my network, I can access it from anywhere in the world thanks to a Microsoft free URL mapped to my server. Not only that, but I can also remotely access and control any PC on the network as well. Now that's not a new trick, places like Go to my PC offer that service but this is all free. Nothing to buy.

4. Streaming media. Add in your music and pictures your WHS becomes a media server for Windows Connect. That means my XBox can see it and play.

5. It's a platform. Yep, it's built on Windows Sever 2003 so it's solid and there's a whole SDK for developing server apps. Microsoft is running a code contest for the best apps, so expect even more cool stuff.

some quirks?

1. The message is mixed. Is this about NAS? Backup? Remote Access? Nope, it's all of the above. It's going to be a challenge to get the message out about this. Where does this go in the retail channel? next to PCs? In the storage aisle? the networking aisle? (hint, it belongs next to the PCs)

2. No automatic copying of music and pictures for media functions. While backup is automatic, there's no way to keep the media folders automatically updated. And while I can remotely access those files with WMC, there's no streaming or automatic way to view the content over the web. What this needs is something like Apple's Web Gallery.. and something as slick.

3. Remote access is complicated. Granted, doing stuff like port forwarding is a tech challenge and while the server bravely tried to open the ports automatically, it failed. Unfortunately, there's description how to do it manually or even what ports need to be forwarded. (the magic ports are 443 and 4125 as well as port 80 if you want to access your server over HTTP not HTTPS). Compared to a product like the slingbox, whose help file tells you exactly what ports to open, what the correct IP settings are for your network also has detailed screen captures of about 10 gazillion routers to show you what to do). Remote access is a key feature and needs to be made better.

In a world where we are increasingly see what we call the "IT-ization of the Consumer" a product like WHS is a necessity for multi PC households. It does what it does very well, if Microsoft and partners can get the marketing down and fix some of the glitches (it's an extensible platform remember) than this thing is going to be a hit.