This past week a few members of the Windows Home Server team were in Tokyo, Japan. Along with the local team from Microsoft Japan, we were very pleased to host the first Windows Home Server Users Night! The venue was a banquet room on the 47th floor of the Keio Plaza Hotel, in the Shinjuku area of Tokyo which afforded a beautiful view of the cityscape and a free "light show" courtesy of a passing thunderstorm.
About 30 enthusiastic people showed up to enjoy food, drinks, and all things Windows Home Server. Kenichi-san, a technical evangelist from Microsoft Japan, was the master of ceremony. After a brief presentation, the attendees got a chance to pepper the Microsoft team with questions. Topics ranged from positioning versus the competition, to very technical aspects of the product. It was an interesting exercise working through a Japanese translator!
For those of you following the Windows Home Server World Cup, the Users Night attendees assured the Microsoft team that Japan would rise quickly in the rankings once the Japanese version of Windows Home Server is available. We certainly hope they are right.
We also discovered that in conjunction with availability of Japanese online forums, a competition had taken place earlier in the year for Windows Home Server applications.
http://www.homeserver-forum.com/communityhs/contest/hs_contest_3rd.asp
Interested in an application for Windows Home Server that monitors your aquarium? (PH levels of the water, water temperature, room temperature, lighting/brightness, and the requisite aquarium web camera). It’s all written in Japanese but was quite a unique and original scenario. Congratulations Mr. Yoshihiro Okabe!
Steven
Last December, I posted a story to my personal blog titled "Windows Home Server is actually useful!" where I had an opportunity to benefit from the power of Windows Home Server's home computer backup and restore capability myself. In that case it was all about "protecting time".
Another example where it can help save time is when you want to put a new/larger hard drive in a home computer. I wrote about how to do this here about a year ago before we even shipped.
Yesterday, like the idiot I can sometimes be, I accidentally killed the partition on the second drive in my main work desktop machine. A developer and I were trying to get a USB key formatted in a particular way and I was using DISKPART.EXE to do the job. DISKPART.EXE is a very powerful, but potentially dangerous tool provided with Windows for working with disk partitions. It's a command line tool that will do precisely what you ask it.
In my case I asked it to delete the partition of "disk 2" and it did it's job. However, I *meant* to delete a partition on disk 3.
Disk 2 is drive D: on my system and it's a 1TB drive that I use for source code enlistments and "extra" backups of all my old stuff. It has about 700GB of data on it. Most of that 700GB is easily replaceable, but some of it is old documents and things from old projects that I am not sure are archived anywhere else. Oops.
I got that bad feeling in my stomach for just a moment. Then I remembered that this computer is backed up by the Windows Home Server in my office. I simply started the Windows Home Server computer restore process, picked the most recent backup, told it to restore the D: drive, and then went home. 700GB of data will take quite a few hours to restore, even over a gigabit network, but I knew it would be done in the morning. And sure enough this morning the process had completed and I had my drive back exactly the way it was before I screwed up.
This is an example of how Windows Home Server's home computer backup and restore capability can "protect data".
There is nothing else out there that even comes close to it's ease of use and power. Kudos to "Q team" for delivering such a kick-butt solution! (If you want to understand this technology at a deeper level we've got a technical brief here).
You may think I'm biased. I am. But I'm not alone in my opinion of this capability. Check out this post from another "Charlie" over on the x(perts)64 blog.
If you have not tried Windows Home Server yourself, what's stopping you? You can download a free 120 day eval version (sign up for the public beta of Windows Home Server with Power Pack 1 to get the latest bits) to install on a frankenmachine or a VM and get hooked. Or you can buy one of the great OEM products available and skip that step :-).
Cheers!
-Charlie Kindel
Just noticed this announcement from HAI: http://www.homeauto.com/newsandevents/pressreleases/content/20080610WL3.asp
"WL3 for Windows Home Server...allows you to change your home’s temperatures, adjust the lights or security settings, or view any supported camera securely and easily. WL3 automatically configures supported UPnP IP cameras on your home network and allows you to manually configure other IP cameras on your network or cameras that reside anywhere on the Internet. It also allows you to view and record video from cameras in your home or from public IP cameras around town, such as traffic and weather cameras. Regardless of the brand of camera, the video is displayed in the WL3 format so that all camera feeds have a consistent look and feel. Easily select any camera, choose the frame rate and screen size, manually start and stop video recording, take a snapshot of the video image, and play, pause, or stop the video stream."
I've been a hard core home automation freak for a loooong time. My previous house boasted a mish-mash of stuff mostly based around X10, but my current house has a bunch of high-end systems (Lutron for lighting, Crestron for AV, Caddx for Security, Enerzone for HVAC, Panasonic for phone, and something I built myself for Irrigation and security cameras) all integrated together with a now-defunct, but amazingly well done, piece of software called Premise. By the way Premise works great on Windows Home Server but www.premisesystems.com appears to be offline for good :-(. With all this talk about "Smart Homes" I do need to disclose fully that my wife calls our house the "Stupid House". But I'll get it all working reliably any day now :-).
Windows Home Server provides a phenomenal platform for home control and it is great to see multiple vendors embracing it and providing consumers with solutions:
This category is just one of the dozens where people are targeting Windows Home Server as a platform. You can find lists of 3rd party products that work on and with Windows Home Server at several enthusiast sites, including www.wegotserved.co.uk.
-cek