The Windows Home Server Add-In Challenge '09 | The Coffeehouse

Simo
With me it's a full-time job.

Hi all,

This is a fairly (ok... completely) shameless plug for the 'Windows Home Server Add-In Challenge '09' competition being run by http://home-server-blog.de and http://wegotserved.com, a couple of WHS community sites.

The competition (backed by MS, HP, Fujitsu +more) was for the best suggestion for a WHS AddIn. Judges have now picked the top 10, so it's too late to enter, but they now want your votes to decide the winner. The winning idea will be developed into a product for the WHS community.

Disclosure: I'm actually one of the ten finalists! So if you'd like to see a Time Capsule feature to allow your Mac's Time Machine to back itself up to your WHS follow the link below and vote 'Time Machine' Wink

Whoever you vote for I'd really appreciate it you hit this link http://www.wegotserved.com/2009/06/15/vote-for-the-winner-of-the-windows-home-server-add-in-idea-challenge-09/ and vote for your favourite idea.

Cheers,

KevinB

Thanks for the link. I voted for the Skydrive plug-in because that is the one that sounded the most useful to me. Your OS X Time Machine plug-in sounds like a fantastic idea, but I don't have a Mac so it wouldn't be of much use to me. You should stick up a YouTube video or something showing installation and it just working, I like the way you have said yours is no fuss, just works, that is very appealing.

Simo
With me it's a full-time job.

In reply to KevinB

#Jun 16th @ 6:46 AM

Thanks for the positive words Kevin.

I'd really like to see MS put the SkyDrive feature into the next version of the WHS product. First 25Gb for free, small scaling charge for greater. In the past I've seen slightly snarky comments from WHS people about Time Capsule's inability to do this, so time they stood up delivered themselves IMO.

dahat

As thrilled as I am to see all of this interest... I’m a lil worried about expectations as no matter how good of a dev as Felix is... several of these finalist ideas are not exactly possible given a requirement on documented API’s (ie SkyDrive) or how Drive Extender works (Undelete).

KevinB

In reply to Simo

#Jun 16th @ 6:59 AM

Yeah, but I think that goes on to the broader point of MS consolidating all their 'cloud' type file management offerings.

Currently, there is Live Mesh, Live Sync, Live SkyDrive, Groove, Office Live Workspaces.

Wouldn't it be nice if all this was integrated.

PaoloM
Hypermediocrity

In reply to KevinB

#Jun 16th @ 11:44 AM

Live Sync is not cloud storage, but a p2p sync tool.

Skydrive and Office Live, I *believe* they're already using the same backend storage.

Groove and Mesh are doing their own thing Smiley

KevinB

In reply to PaoloM

#Jun 16th @ 1:10 PM

But Sync and Mesh offer the same functionality. In Mesh, you can set a folder to sync P2P bypassing the cloud, this is the exact same feature that Live Sync offers. (Even if their respective implementations differ wildly...)

So, my point is still valid, all those products do essentially the same thing with varying success.

And, it leads to very, very confused customers....

Edit: Also, in regards to your same backend remark, I could care less how it is implemented on the backend. They don't share the same front end. Which means that if I am on SkyDrive and I want to access my documents, I need to go to a whole different site, why??? I know you aren't on any of these teams, so I don't actually expect you to be able to answer this question Smiley

PaoloM
Hypermediocrity

In reply to KevinB

#Jun 16th @ 5:23 PM

My understanding (and I'm not on those teams, so as you properly note, I have no authority Smiley ) is that the sync part of Mesh is basically a "tech demo", to show off the platform capabilities, but it's not the main concept.

So Sync is very different from SkyDrive and Office Live. Now, why can't you access your data from both sites? Good question Smiley

tezzer

In reply to dahat

#Jun 16th @ 10:19 AM

Hi dahat Smiley

Yes, we had to weed out a lot of entirely impossible suggestions from the hundreds that were sent in, like P2P remote sync and all sorts of Media Center shenanigans .

Felix is doing more work on feasibility on the final ten right now, and certainly some are more difficult than others... will be fun to see what wins. Go vote.

Cheers

Terry

Felix Kollmann

In reply to tezzer

#Jun 17th @ 4:41 AM

dahat,

thank you for your concerns and to all who contribute their ideas and thoughts in and on the AIC09.

We are aware that there are some features on the ideas that might not be possible to implement. We expect that the final add-in will be a subset of the winning idea as it will be a subset of other (similar) ideas' features which did not make it to the top 10 or 30.

There is currently heavy work goiing on to develop concepts for the top 10 ideas to maximize the user benefit. The main goal is to have a good use case for the add-in which might not reflect the winning idea in its whole.

We really appreciate the dicussions on the ideas and we're thinking about concepts to have the community with us while developing the add-in. Please expect more to come. After announcing the winner we will provide a concept what features are in and out and how they work (technically).

Greetz Felix

PS: The Undelete feature could be realized searching the drive's VSS and readding the files by copying them from VSS storage via SMB - I fear recreating the reparse points directly might lead to side effects. I think that should work although it's no classic undelete. First tests show good results but they're not representative yet.

ZippyV
Fired Up

What should your plugin have to do to make an Apple computer see the WHS as a device to backup on? Why can't it work without a plugin?

AndyC

In reply to ZippyV

#Jun 17th @ 5:52 AM

Apple Time machine requres a HFS+ volume to back up onto, because of the way it handles file system links and so forth. You'd have to either emulate all the functionality of HFS+ and lie to MacOS, or dump it in an disc image file of some sort.