The team is pleased to announce that Windows Home Server Power Pack 1 has been released to manufacturing (RTM) and is now available on the Microsoft Download Center!
The English version is available now and German, Spanish and French versions will be available on the Download Center soon. Windows Home Server customers who don’t download it on their own will receive Power Pack 1 via Windows Update in August, and the new Chinese and Japanese versions will RTM in August, too.
As many know, Power Pack 1 provides a range of new enhancements, including support for home computers running Windows Vista x64 editions, backup of home server Shared Folders, improvements to remote access, more efficient power consumption and better performance. And, of course, it delivers a fix for the data corruption bug. Documentation for Power Pack 1 (Build #1800, to those who have been part of the beta testing) is available here.
Our OEM partners will be updating their systems with Power Pack 1 and HP will release a software update for the HP MediaSmart Server, delivering enhanced media streaming capabilities from PacketVideo, server-side anti-virus from McAfee and compatibility with 64-bit home PCs.
Windows Home Server can now be purchased in 50 countries worldwide and a growing ecosystem of third-party software developers has released approximately 60 Add-in programs extending Windows Home Server’s capabilities. To help fuel this development we have updated the Windows Home Server software development kit for Power Pack 1, including new support for the client PC side, i.e. notifications to/from home computers.
We continue to hear fantastic feedback from our customers about how Home Server is helping them protect and organize their digital media, access it away from home, and share it with friends and family. Thank you to our beta testers and partners for helping us ship Power Pack 1, and to the Home Server community as a whole, for its ongoing support and enthusiasm.
The Windows Home Server Team
Family Feud was a television game show that featured two families (and in later years, celebrity teams) in a contest to name the most popular responses to a survey-type question posed to 100 people.
Although there will be no 'kissing hosts' and 'loud buzzers', the Windows Home Server team is kicking off a purchaser survey. We want to better understand the usage, attitudes, and satisfaction of purchasers and regular users. If you are a current Windows Home Server system owner, we want to hear from you!
English users
German users
After a successful start to our educational Home Server Webinar series on June 25th (over 350 attendees!), we've lined up a couple more sessions for July.
This time we'll be focusing on how to leverage the HP MediaSmart Server (and Windows Home Server) for digital photography. Learn from guest experts on recommended workflow, photo-focused features of the product, and maybe a few photography ‘tips and tricks’. We have two sessions scheduled for July 17 and July 22nd.
Here's a quick lineup of our guests:
To register for both events please visit our webcast page: www.windows.com/hpmediasmartwebinar. Please register early to secure your spot (we'll do our best to accomodate everyone this time round). ;-)
See you online!
- M.
We have four new Windows Home Server MVPs, Microsoft Most Valuable Professionals, as of July 1st. You can read about them by going to the MVP Awardees link, and selecting Windows Home Server, under the Server Solutions products, or just click here. The 4 new MVPs are:
- Alan Ball
- Henk Panneman
- Colin Hodgson
- Yoshihiro Okabe
Colin and Alan will be updating their profiles shortly ....
Welcome to the team!!
t.
Donavon over at Home Server Hacks has started a new "Ask the Home Server Guy" feature. In his words:
Send in your questions about anything and everything Windows Home Server related and I’ll do my best to answer them. Send your questions to ask@HomeServerGuy.com (note the spiffy new domain name).
Also - Home Server Show 7 went up this week, featuring Nick Asseloos, the author of the popular Add-In AutoExit2008
J
...for this Wednesday, June 25th at 10 a.m. PST for the first in a series of interactive 'Webinars' that Microsoft and HP are collaborating on on Windows Home Server and the HP Mediasmart Server. We're conducting these to offer the broader community a chance to learn more about topics of interest to you - in an engaging, interactive way (via Live Meetings).
First up for this Wednesday: a discussion around ‘software add-ins’ for Windows Home Server, featuring guest Terry Walsh of WeGotServed.co.uk fame (along with representatives from MSFT and HP, of course).
Topics we’ll cover in future Webinars will include ‘Digital Photography and Windows Home Server’ and ‘the mobile traveler/user and Windows Home Server’. We encourage you to visit our Webinar page for additional details and updates on the event schedule, along with links to the event registration pages. Please also post a comment to us know if you have suggestions on future topics. We'd love to hear from you.
Thanks and don’t forget to REGISTER TODAY for this Wednesday’s Webinar! Look forward to seeing everybody online…
M.
Update: We will be posting a link to the archived recording of this Webinar after the event (on this blog) Our apologies for the full registration...Clearly there's significant interest!
Yesterday the Innoventions Dream Home became the latest attraction at Disneyland. Located in Tomorrowland, the Dream Home delivers on "Walt's vision for showcasing cutting-edge technologies that make life better and easier." The Dream Home is a collaboration between Disneyland, Microsoft, HP, Life|ware and home-builder Taylor Morrison. Interestingly, nearly all of the products and technologies featured in the home - including HP MediaSmart Server/Windows Home Server - are available today.
Home Server is included in the Atlanta Journal Constitution story and some of the other press coverage rolling in. Microsoft's press release about the grand opening is here.
J
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.
Cheers!
-cek
I knew it wouldn’t take long for someone to figure out that the Apple Mac Mini is an interesting platform for running Windows Home Server. The Home Server Hacks blog has a detailed step-by-step document of how to re-purpose a Mac Mini to act as a home server.
Forrester recently published a paper entitled, “The Future of Apple Inc.”, that stated by 2013 Apple would likely ship a home server product. If you are a diehard Mac enthusiast, you don’t have to wait 5 more years, you can run the Windows Home Server operating system on a Mac today !!!
t.
The Windows Home Server team, in conjunction with all of our partners, MVPs, and "Dogfooders" is extremely happy to announce that a Release Candidate of Windows Home Server Power Pack 1 (Build 1771) is now available for public download and testing through Microsoft Connect!
There has been a huge amount of testing applied to Power Pack 1 already and we have high confidence that Power Pack 1 solves the data corruption bug that was first identified late last year (Knowledge Base article #946676). We are running this public beta with the aspiration that we will get thousands of beta testers to help us prove that we not only have fixed "the bug", but have significantly improved all parts of Windows Home Server with new features such as:
- Support for PCs running Windows Vista x64 editions
- Backup of home server Shared Folders
- Easier, enhanced remote access capabilities
- Better energy efficiency
- Improved performance
- Chinese and Japanese versions
We will not ship the final release of Windows Home Server Power Pack 1 until the community has validated our work. In the Release Documentation for Windows Home Server Power Pack 1 we outline a number of specific test scenarios. For us to feel our testing has been validated we need a large number of beta testers to work through these scenarios and regular home server operation for a period of time. Given the fantastic number of people who have signed up already (well ahead of the numbers we were hoping for), and how great the community has been in the past in helping us, I am confident we'll get enough testers. The only remaining question is how quickly those testers download the bits and start testing them.
The Windows Home Server Customer Improvement Program allows us to track metrics on product usage and we are anxiously watching how the product is used to gauge when we've hit our target...so we can begin the final release process.
So don't delay. Head on over to Microsoft Connect and sign-up (if you haven't already) and download and start testing Windows Home Server Power Pack 1. We've posted both an update package that can be applied to existing Windows Home Servers as well as updated DVD and CD ISO images of an evaluation version of Windows Home Server with Power Pack 1. If you choose to run the Release Candidate on a "production" home server you should make a backup of everything prior to getting started. Make sure you read the Release Documentation to see what's new and updated!
The Windows Home Server team has added a Power Pack 1 forum to the Windows Home Server Community forums. If you have questions about Power Pack 1, please go there to ask them. Cheers!
Charlie Kindel
The Belinea o.center Home Server from MaxData is now available for sale in Europe. You can find out more information at http://www.amazon.de/belinea or by visiting the MaxData web site – http://www.maxdata.com. And, they even created a translated version of the soon to be infamous children’s book complete with a o.center home server gracing the pages …
t.
Microsoft announced today that Windows Home Server Chinese Edition will be launched in Taiwan in the second half of 2008. OEM Partners including Gigabyte, VIA, WNC, and Sampo who will offer complete solutions for households. Here is a snapshot of an article from Economic Daily on June 5, 2008.
Windows Home Server launch
Home server product booth
Charlie Kindel introduces that Windows Home Server Chinese language support will enable even more partners to build home server software and hardware products
Jim Fredrickson talks about the Home Server ecosystem
Here are some links to additional articles:
iThome Online, 5th Jun. 2008
http://news.veda.com.tw/Newsfile/internet/20086/ithome080605172042-c.htm
UDNdata.com, 5th Jun. 2008
http://news.veda.com.tw/Newsfile/internet/20086/udndata080605172009-c.htm
Money.udn.com, 5th Jun. 2008
http://news.veda.com.tw/Newsfile/internet/20086/udn080605172050-c.htm
The Windows Home Server World Cup results for May are in and Norway remains on top and extends its lead over its competition. They look like they are going to be hard to catch, as it seems that the Norwegians understand the power of benefits of Windows Home Server and continue to bring it into their homes at a rapid pace. New Zealand and the USA are still in the #2 and #3 spots, and Denmark made a huge surge to secure the 4th spot as time is running down. Canada is now in the top 8, with less than 30 days left in Microsoft's fiscal year. The standings are:
- Norway
- New Zealand
- United States
- Denmark
- Germany
- United Kingdom
- Canada
- Australia
The standings are computed by taking Windows Home Server sales divided by the number of households with a broadband connection in each country. Updated standings will be published next month.
