I'm leaving momentarily for the airport, heading to Seattle for the 2009 Microsoft MVP Summit. I'll be spending a lot of time with the Home Server team as well as other MVPs such as Terry from WeGotServed, Phil from MSWHS, and Donavon from HomeServerHacks.

I'm open to any feedback or questions you'd like me to bring to the Home Server team. I can't promise to answer everything, but do promise to share your feedback.

Unfortunately the site issues here aren't fully resolved, but I'm implementing a plan to get to a more stable future and will be working on that from Seattle as I have time, as well as monitoring the site here as best I can.

Thanks for all you do,
Alex

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Alex Kuretz
Remote Notification: Monitoring and alerting for your Home Server via email, Twitter, text message, RSS, push notifications, and on your Mac desktop
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Alex,
Have a great trip. I am glad you are getting to go. It should be exciting to see what is being worked on by the WHS Team and see your counterparts for hosting great sites like yours.

In response to your request for input, anything you could find out about plans for better integration of WHS and Media Center would be of interest to me. I know the subject has been mentioned many times as the major hole in WHS so it will probaly be a question you aleady have in mind, but it is so important to me I wanted to reiterate my interest.

Whatever your NDA allows you to share about integration of WHS/MC when you get back would be welcome.

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It is the mark of an educated mind to be able to entertain a thought without accepting it.
Aristotle - Greek critic, philosopher, physicist, & zoologist (384 BC - 322 BC)

If you are able, please push the team to make the use of the WHS controls officially supported for Add-In development. Documentation and the ability to report bugs is really needed.

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HP MSS EX490, Intel Core 2 Quad Q9300, 1TB System drive, 6TB Storage pool managed by StableBit DrivePool

Fair points, though I'd like a little elaboration. Is the documentation you're seeking on the controls (if they were to become supported) or more general documentation/examples? Bugs are reportable via Connect, is there some additional tool or process you're looking for?

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Alex Kuretz
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Documentation on how to use them. Since they are not officially supported for use in non-MS add-ins I don't think I can report the problems I've encountered using them. Things in the FancyListView like no center or right alignment, bad flickering, odd looking text if I force doublebuffering on, rightmost column always consumes remaining space (this is done by design I think). It's pretty clear that they designed the FLV for their specific needs but I'd like to see it expanded and make all their controls officially available.

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HP MSS EX490, Intel Core 2 Quad Q9300, 1TB System drive, 6TB Storage pool managed by StableBit DrivePool

Got it, I did pass this along to the team during our extensibility discussions, and while I can't speak about futures the team did listen very carefully and understand that this is something that would help developers working on Home Server Add-Ins.

Needless to say I have no doubt that proper documentation would accompany any SDK changes.

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Alex Kuretz
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I think they really need to take a long hard look at the console. It is really totally inadaquate if anything at all goes wrong because of an update or add in. It's also very slow to load. If they stay with the present interface idea then they need a freeze or go back feature for the OS drive so that server recovery is only used for hardware failure.

Good feedback, and I can say that comments similar to this were shared with the teams.

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Alex Kuretz
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Is it worth asking if they will be considering the addition/upgrade of the Windows Media Connect and/or WMP to more current versions to support other streaming media capabilities and plug-ins such as PlayOn, DIVX Connect, and even flash streaming plugins for things like YouTube or more importantly Hulu.

Maybe too specific but there might be a question in all of that.

I would also highly recommend them extending support to other devices/technologies in the product, such as DLNA compliant devices, or even *gasp* linux products.

That's all definitely good feedback, and while I cannot speak about any details of the future versions of WHS, I think it's safe to say that we all recognize the value of media to almost all users, and that the home server can do a better job of aggregating, storing, and sharing that content.

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Alex Kuretz
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I would like to see intergration of outlook server and WHS. I think that since there is an option to use this as a webserver intergation like that would be fully called for. plus the 10 user limit is about the size of a large family.

It seems to me most average home users are pretty happy with their web email or ISP for providing email service, and more importantly not up to the task of maintaining an Exchange server. There's also an issue with losing power or internet at your home, if that happens you could lose emails, as most homes don't have redundant power and internet connectivity. Some type of mail aggregation and/or backup functionality makes more sense to me. I'm not saying I won't share your feedback, simply offering my perspective, and unfortunately I'm at the airport on my way home from the Summit so will have to share it with the team another time.

I do think we're seeing that the 10 client limit is a bit small for some households and I believe MS heard that feedback from a couple people this week.

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Alex Kuretz
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I was thinking that TZO offers email store and forward my understanding is that it can handle storing emails up to 100mb when there are server outages. I was thinking this would get people away from ISP send limits. plus also introduce them to more functionality. it was a reach ha-ha. I dont think it was that far out there look at WHS when it was first debuted. people were like ?!?!?! whats the point. Then sites like this came along and people were then like WOW!! look what I can do....

Thanks Yakuza I appreciated you humoring me hahahaha

Now that's an interesting idea, I think it might be a more reasonable Add-In idea from an ISV or Add-In developer, just not likely to be a core WHS feature.

Thanks for your comments!

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Alex Kuretz
Remote Notification: Monitoring and alerting for your Home Server via email, Twitter, text message, RSS, push notifications, and on your Mac desktop
Have you tried our Add-Ins? If so, be sure to Rate them at WeGotServed.