One of the more exciting announcements that many may have been missed in the iPhone haze last week was Windows Home Server. It's a headless Windows 2003 appliance that 1) backs up data from all computers on a network, 2) streams media, and 3) provides remote access to documents over the Internet.
Alex and I had discussed doing something awhile back based on Microsoft Small Business Server 2003. In fact, Alex even have a virtual machine image created, where the OS was on one drive and all data was on another - in our case, on external flash storage. The three features above are great, but there are three other features we felt were core to such a system, and I'd love to see them addressed before this is released.
First of all, a local mail server. I know they want people to use Live.com, but the fact is more and more businesses are blocking web mail. They mostly likely won't know, and thus won't be able to block, your home PC. Furthermore, the integration with Outlook with Live.com is not as good as with Exchange Server - and Microsoft does, of course, want to sell more copies of Outlook. Exchange is a big reason I - and Alex and many others - currently run SBS at home. Sell the box with, say, a 5-user version of Exchange and put ads in the OWA/Live.com web frontend.
The second addition I would like to see a Sharepoint server. According to Engadget, there is no common web interface. I want my server to have a personal portal with my mail, documents, calendar and so on.
Finally, it would be good to integrate with an offsite backup system. Omar suggests that it could easily be integrated with services like Carbonite (or more likely a Live.com storage service). The important thing, I think, is that offsite backup is available seamlessly out of the box. I want to be able to buy this for my father and have him plug it in like a router. I want the home server to scavenge for his documents, organize them for him, and back them up (both locally and remotely).
Oh, and while I really hope it looks like this...
I think this one is more likely. It is, after all, our of Redmond and not Cupertino.
