I’ve been using WHS for three weeks or so now. The really surprising thing is that it simply melts into the background. Until you need to do a manual backup or Remote desktop in, it effectively drops from your radar.
I’ve been transferring more and more of my work files to the WHS and working with them directly from there ( things go slightly slower, but, hey 🙂 ). It allows me to work from any PC in the house with out first having to copy the files between machines. It really is great. The whole idea really works well.
WHS backup runs once a day over lunch and I never have to worry about it. I might just throw away my Norton Ghost disk…
Now as far a wish list goes…
- WHS screams like mad if the laptop is not backed up two days running ( some days its not used and kept off). It would be useful to tell WHS to cool off for while.
- WHS should keep an eye on what’s going on client PC’s and back them up if needed (I.e. when you install new software) and label the backups accordingly ( I.e. if its a program install it should be “[program name] Install”)
- The Health Monitoring tool could be greatly expanded up to drill, down to the status of each PC in real time. I’m probably wishing a bit to much to say that integration with Norton Internet Security to show status would be cool.
- It would be really good to schedule a startup/shutdown period. Putting the fact that servers a meant to be kept on 24/7 aside for a moment, people may actually want to switch them off after their nightly backups to save on electricity ( and thus feel even better about the environment). Currently I shutdown mine via the Console ( really cool feature 🙂 ).
- Not sure about how many people use Outlook, but being able to have a Shared Outlook Calendar would be really good ( Similar to Rick’s point 4 below).
The rest comes from Rick Hallihan over at the One Man Shouting blog:
- 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.
Also according to Rick, the SDK is coming out this month sometime.
I have tried the Remote Access functionality a bit ( albeit from this PC rather than a really remote one) and found it lacking in extra stuff. I’m away for the weekend, so might try it out for real then.
Rick asks an interesting question: Do you actually need that Remote Access?
The “Access all your files from anywhere” model is pretty cool. Right now I’ve got it set up using DynDNS (pretty easy but not very consumer friendly), but it looks like by release time there’s going to be some sort of integration with Live Domains, so that this will be a simple set up. Even this functionality can fade into the background though. Honestly, since I set this up, I used it a couple of times, just to play around with it, but I haven’t actually needed that remote access.
Given that a) there is an SDK and that b) Microsoft is releasing the Website as part of the SDK ( so people can add pages and functionality to it), the Remote Access site really will turn into something more useful over and above what it can already do.
Random Musings 