One household at a time is the strategy with which the Windows Home Server team wants to solve the problems of households with multiple PCs and a broadband connection. Todd Headrick, the product planner for the Microsoft Windows Home Server, revealed that even from the early stages of the product, the strategy has always been focused on a solution for the household and not for the individual machines it contained.

This is why, Microsoft has focused on developing a product with three key capabilities: "Automated Computer Backup with simple restore for your home computers", "Access everything from anywhere" and "Solution that grows with you."

First off, Windows Home Server delivers automated backup functionality. This means that across a household, all the PCs connected to the WHS heart can have their data restored to a previous point in time. Additionally, Windows Home Server centralizes all the information in a household, enabling users to access the data from locations inside and outside the house, at any given time, as it is designed to be an always on solution.

Scalability is another key aspect of the product. "Windows Home Server grows with you and meets your needs, today and into the future. It is incredibly easy to add hard drives as you need more space for your documents, photos, music and videos," Headrick said.

Windows Home Server was also configured for easy deployment. It only requires users to set up the hardware with the router/firewall via an ethernet cable and load the Windows Home Server Connector software on the computers in the home. Windows Home Server will support Both Windows XP and Windows Vista.

"After the Windows Home Server Connector software is installed, a full image-based backup of each home computer is initiated every single night by the Windows Home Server software. From these backups stored on the home server, you can do a complete restore of the entire PC or open up one of these backups to restore individual files and folders. By default, we make the assumption that people want to backup all of the PCs in their house so they can do a complete image-based restore if necessary, and we have some great technology for consuming very little disk space on your home server for all of these backups," Headrick added.