Goodbye, Farewell, and Amen
Feb 6, 2012 9:52 AM,
By Eric B. Rux
“Welcome home! I know it’s been a long, hard day at work, but we really need to talk about your home office. It’s not what it should be. What if someone breaks into your home and takes your laptop? What if there’s a fire, and you lose a lot of valuable, irreplaceable data? We need to discuss a solution that will be easy to set up and maintain, and best of all, will put your mind at ease. You need a server for your home.”
That’s how I started off the very first “Coming home to Windows Home Server” column back in October of 2007. I’ve had a great time these last four years, but it’s time to move on. I hope you have found our monthly chats informative, and had as much fun reading them as I had writing them.
As I close out this series, I’m left wondering what will happen to our beloved Windows Home Server. While the product has been successful, there have, shall we, say, been a few bumps along the way. The first one started off with disk corruption issue that took a long time to fix. I spoke on Windows Home Server at a conference that year, and that one was difficult to explain away. Luckily, Microsoft was able to get the problem resolved and put the problem behind them.
The second bump came with the newest edition of Home Server: Home Server 2011, and even prompted a few MVP’s (myself included) to write a passionate letter to Steve Balmer. One of the cool features of the first version of Home Server was the Drive Extender feature, but Microsoft decided to take it out of the 2011 edition. The explanation that they gave at the time didn’t sound quite right, and the rumor was that they couldn’t get it to work with all of the other server products. Whatever the reason, it’s a mute point now as companies such as Drive Bender figured out how to do it just as good or better than Microsoft.
One of the coolest features of both editions of Home Server is the ability for third-party programmers to enhance the basic functionality through Add Ins. I wrote about these handy tools a lot these past four years. Here are some of my favorites.
Well, that’s just a quick overview what some of the things we have covered in this column. It has been a fun ride, and I’m thankful to Sound & Video Contractor for the opportunity.
Thank you for reading.
