14 DAY TRIAL // Windows Home Server is on a roll. At the end of February 2007, Microsoft has already sent out a total of 20,000 invitations to the second beta of Windows Home Server. And the WHS team showed no signs of stopping. On the first day of March, additional testers were welcomed to the program.
"Sent out another big batch of Connect Invite IDs today. One person had registered fourteen (14!) different times - welcome to Beta2 !! Thanks for the great feedback. The number of quality bugs that are being submitted is fantastic. The more descriptive you are, the easier it is to reproduce the problem and start working on a fix," revealed a member of the Windows Home Server team.
Todd Headrick, the product planner for the Microsoft Windows Home Server discussed the remote access capabilities of the product, building on the vision of anywhere access. "One of the key features of Windows Home Server will be to allow users to easily connect to their home server when they are away from home. By default, the Remote Access capabilities will be turned off, but they will be easy to setup once a user decides that they want to enable this feature," Headrick explained.
Remote Access can be defined via the Windows Home Server Console on a per user basis. Access will be made over the Internet through a password. Users will be able to download and upload content from the Shared Folders on the home server, but also to connect to any machine in the household.
"This means that you can not only connect to your home server, but you can also remotely connect and use your home computers all through a single solution. We have been working closely with the Windows Live Domains team to provide users a personalized internet address to their home server as part of the Remote Access setup feature. This functionality is not part of the Beta 2 release, but it is being actively tested by our Microsoft dogfooders and will be made available to the broader beta community in a subsequent development milestone," Headrick added.