Andreas Miceli, the creator of popular WHS v1 Add-Ins Advanced Admin Console, Update History, Fritz Box and Scaleo has announced a Technical Preview of Advanced Admin Console vNext Add-In for Windows Home Server Vail and Aurora.
Last year Andreas received the We Got Served Reader Award 2009 for his popular Advanced Admin Console Add-In. He has been hard at work developing this Add-In for Vail and Aurora and has now made it available for a Technical Preview and is soliciting a select few testers to participate in a Private Beta.
The Technical Preview comes with a well documented 12 page guide that provides you with information on how to install the Add-In, an overview and feature descriptions of the software. The guide also lists the known issues and limitations of the software. Unlike many Add-Ins in the past which did lack good documentation it is nice to see more and more add-ins now being released with such documentation and I can tell you it’s very detailed as well.
If you are already familiar with Advanced Admin Console and enjoy using it I think you will enjoy using this new version even more. While my exposure to the Add-In so far is limited I was able to adapt to it quite quickly. Once the Add-In is installed you will see it appear on the Dashboard very much like WHS v1. When you select the Advanced Admin Console vNext Tab you will see two additional sub-tabs appear on the left of the screen, Explorer and Web Browser. The Explorer sub-tab provides you access to the servers functions much the same way as using Windows Explorer. This will make using Advanced Admin Console very user friendly since everyone is already familiar with Windows Explorer. The Web Browser sub-tab provides a basic version of Windows Internet Explorer onto your Dashboard. This enables you to access and interface with other devices and services on your network.
This is the first add-in I have ever installed in Vail and it’s actually quite interesting on how you go about installing add-ins for Vail. You have to have a client connected to Vail and you actually run the Add-In from the Client which then installs it onto the server. I have to admit when I was doing this I was nervous but it works very well. This I think will be a plus for Vail as it does simplify the installation of Add-Ins.
Andrea Miceli is a professional software developer located in Passau, Germany. He has been developing Add-Ins for Windows Home Server since 2007. It is estimated that there are 18,000 users worldwide who have used his Advanced Admin Console which was introduced as a beta in 2008. In 2009 he received the We Got Served Reader Award 2009.
Additional information about Andreas and his Add-Ins is available on his blog at http://www.home-server-addins.com/about.
Article by Stephen Bruce
By day I am a Plant Engineer running a food container manufacturing facility which supplies containers to the Chinese Restaurant Industry. By night I spend my time helping others with their Windows Home Servers, working on various server projects. My other interests are animals, photography, media streaming, cultural history and linguistics. You can find me in the MediaSmartServer.net forums as Comp1962
{ 1 trackback }