RSSMicrosoft credits/blames user feedback for latest Home Server delay
By Scott M. Fulton, III | Published September 30, 2009, 11:38 AM
It's beginning to be a habit: In the short history of Microsoft's surprisingly popular Windows Home Server product, its first two major upgrades (each with truckloads of bug fixes), called Power Packs, suffered from delays -- especially after Microsoft heavily promoted their upcoming release. Monday evening, it happened again: After what appeared to be a successful launch event at the CEDIA 2009 expo in Atlanta last week, Microsoft announced that Power Pack 3's release is now slated for toward the end of this year.
That's bad news for many customers who had been planning to upgrade their home systems to Windows 7. There are a number of features in the current Windows Home Server Power Pack 2, designed for Vista, that do not work properly in Windows 7, especially with respect to backup -- one of the main reasons to use Home Server in the first place. PP3 was supposed to include the fixes that make it compatible with Win7's completely revised backup, and last week, at least, they looked pretty good.
There is only one way that Microsoft could have made the situation worse for Home Server users, and that is by making it appear that they were the reason for the delay. But that's what product representative Nicole Berett implied in a statement on one of the company's blogs last night.
"The bottom line is that we've gotten tremendous feedback (and test coverage) from you, our enthusiasts, around Power Pack 3 -- and we couldn't be more excited," Berett wrote, invoking one of those euphemisms that have come to be associated with letdowns. "This being said, our top priority is to ensure the absolute highest level of product quality, and to this end, we will continue with additional testing of the software. As with past software releases, our team will not ship the official final release of Power Pack 3 until the community has validated our work. We expect to deliver before the end of the year."
Berett went on to say that the latest beta of PP3 does appear to resolve the main Windows 7 incompatibility issues, including the ability to do a full "bare metal restore," and enabling Win7 clients to wake up automatically to perform overnight backups. But with GA day for Windows 7 still set at October 22, Home Server users may be stuck using the PP3 beta for at least another three months.
The only real clue as to why this latest delay is occurring, if the issue is not technical, comes from the fact that suddenly there are two Windows Home Server blogs. The one that had been kept up by the engineering team, through TechNet, this morning deferred the bad news announcement (wisely) to this new one maintained by the marketing team. The old blog's community lead, Kevin Beares, foreshadowed a likely transition of power to marketing with an ominous sounding blog post yesterday that contained the following: "In the near future, we may make a complete move from our TechNet location to the Windows Team Blog. Stay tuned..."
There is only one way that Microsoft could have made the situation even worse for itself than this: Early this morning, in an coincidental move that surely could not be blamed on him, another marketing team member on a separate section of the Windows Team Blog stressed the vital importance of all of Microsoft's partners getting products for Windows 7 ready on time, in a post praising his team's Windows 7 Logo program.
"The Compatible With Windows 7 Logo is designed to help customers make better purchase decisions by identifying products that have passed Microsoft designed tests for compatibility and reliability with Windows 7," wrote senior director for strategy Mark Relph. "Since we designed Windows 7 to be compatible with the products you use every day, many of these products will just work and thousands of partners are committing to meeting an even higher quality bar."
As it turns out, though, it will be Microsoft itself that will fail to meet many of Relph's goals, with one of Windows 7's major supporting products probably missing the holiday shopping rush.
Even though WHS has been out for a year, I still fail to see the point when a BSD/Linux server is functionally superior. If any BN readers use WHS, why would I want to switch to it? Its noteable absence in most of the tech news and in the general server market place make me wonder if it's worth the trouble.
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|The biggest point of WHS is that you dont have to know LINUX/BSD. I run it at because I am limited in what i can do with my ClarkConnect machine. I do not know how to manage linux but I do know how to manage a windows server. Clark connect is great for content filtering and web proxy some of the other built in features but i do not know how to add to it unless it can be done via the web interface. Yes I know I am a point it and click geek but I am sure there are others out there like me. With Windows home server I have all my movies streaming to my Windows Media machines...my fireplay stremaing all my music, running bcakups and just add storage as I need it. I could not do that with a linux based option.
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|Thanks for the response. I prefer (but don't absolutely require) graphical interfaces myself so can see where you're coming from.
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|Automated, incremental backup for Windows machines with single-instance storage and the world's simplest software RAID setup? And that's ignoring the easy file-sharing/web-serving/media extender aspects of the software. But the overnight backup of all your machines (whether they're on or not) without fiddling around is pretty awesome. It also means if you and a family member both have the same files on your system (family photos, music or even system files) then they don't get backed up twice.
I've asked this at least a dozen times, but if someone knows a Linux server setup that works in the same way, I'd be keen to try it.
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|I use two machines as servers in my home. One is a CentOS firewall and I know Linux pretty well.
The other is a WHS that I built from my MSDN Sub. I love the home server. I can restore any machine at home to any day it backed up. It allows me to only mirror certain folders like my accounting data and pictures, instead of an entire drive.
I used to run a Linux file server, but WHS won me over.
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|"Windows Home Server....one of Windows 7's major supporting products probably missing the holiday shopping rush."
Uh...
Since when?
WHS is all but non-existant to the majority of people. Almost no-one's heard of it. Fewer are asking about it. Perhaps it is a good thing the blog is being transferred to marketing....it might actually *get* some marketing. Not that marketing has ever been MSFT's strong suit...regardless of some people's claims of "paid-shills".
I was really excited when WHS was first in Beta...it has steadily waned since until I finally ditched it all together.
Stopped using it when I upgraded my systems to 7. Don't see a need for it any more. HomeGroup covers the sharing, and the backups to a mapped drive on what used to be the WHS system (now running 7) with a restore CD pretty much cover the redundancy.
The addons I used are all replaced by programs running on that system that are not only more functional, but receive far more updates and actually have *gasp* support.
So mark it on your calendars, folks. A Microsoft product fathead favors, and I do not.
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|Agreed. I haven't had any home users ask me anything about WHS. Most brick and mortar retailers don't really have a good display to explain to consumers why they would want a Windows Home Server assuming they sell any of the WHS units at all. I bet most retail salespeople would have a hard time selling it.
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|I will admit, this is a product Microsoft has not done too shabby a job with. Sure, like any Microsoft software it has a ton of bugs and corruption issues out of the gate, but they have been fixing the issues without forcing people to buy the service pack, i mean new version like Windows Home Server 7 or something. This is a good thing.
The thing which really suprises me is Apple is _the_ platform for multimedia yet they really have nothing other than their single drive Time Capsule. If Apple made a home server appliance I would buy it in a second, but until then, I think Windows Home Server is the best choice out there.
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|Someone hijacked Fatty's account because he actually is making sense here...The Windows Home Server product has been quite nice but it has been buggy - I never had to worry about the corruption issue and it has been stable on my old emachine pc - wish the add-ons were better but it gets the job done and my Dad can use it so that's always a plus.
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|LOL, he still would buy the Apple product in one second. Without even testing or reading about it. One second... pretty blindly in other words. And who's the fanboy? haha...
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|That's because he is Steve Jobs gay partner
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|I would buy the Apple because i do not want to buy products from Microsoft if I can avoid it. I vote with my dollars. Apple on the whole makes very compelling solutions which is why you see everyone, including Microsoft, chasing them and copying them.
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|Aren't you asking Apple to copy Microsoft and make a decent home server?
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|Yep. Like I said in my original post..."I will admit, this is a product Microsoft has not done too shabby a job with."
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