Windows Phone 7 Add-in for SBS 2011 Essentials and WHS 2011 (Release Candidate)

Today the Release Candidate of the Windows Server Solutions Phone Connector for Small Business Server 2011 Essentials (aka Integrating Windows Phone 7 with your SBS 2011 Essentials Server) is available

The purpose of this Add-in is to enable Remote Server Management tasks for SBS 2011 Essentials including

Alerts

After you complete the authentication steps with the server that you are trying to connect to, an alerts listing is the first panorama item that the application launches into. This feature brings the Alert Viewer that you know from the server, to the phone.

If an alert is displayed white, it is active and included in the alert count. If an alert is dimmed, that means the alert is disabled, and it is not included in the alert count. Any alert item can be clicked to view the full alert text just as on a computer. Contextual menu options include enabling or disabling an alert, and performing a repair action if one was assigned to this alert.

Users

The user-panorama item performs basic user management tasks, including:

• Viewing user account details
• Enable or disable a user account
• Change a user account password

If you disable a user account, that is a reversible action. The moment a user account gets disabled, it causes the same effect as it would if you disable it by using the dashboard. The user’s access to Remote Web Access, the phone application, and any server resources is turned off.

Devices

“Devices” is a panorama item that lets you:

• View server-joined computer and Mac details.
• View the backup status that every device last reported to the server.
• Start or stop a backup for any computer or the server (from the contextual menu).

Live Tile Support

If you pin the application to the home screen of your Windows Phone 7, you will be able to see a variety of at-a-glance information without launching into the application. An opt-in using the settings menu is required.

The at-a-glance information includes:

• Count and type of network health alerts.
• Percentage of storage use of your main disk.
• Server name sending this information.

The Windows Phone 7 application requires both a server sided add-in to be installed on the SBS 2011 Essentials Server, as well as Windows 7 Phone application downloadable via marketplace.

If you end up getting the Windows Home Server version, you’ll also get live media streaming

Media Support (Home Server Only)

The Media panorama lets you discover and view streams of media elements that you stored on your server in the appropriate shared folders (such as Music, Video and Picture shares).

Music

MP3 non-Digital Rights Management-protected songs will be streamed directly from the server to your phone. Album art is also transported. Your library is searchable and can be organized in different views to help find what you want fast.

 

 

 

Pictures

“Pictures” has a variety of functions:

• Discover all .png and .jpg images that are stored in the Pictures shared folder on the server. Subfolders are recognized.
• Open a picture full-screen to view it on the phone.
• Save a copy of the picture to the phone, using its original dimensions and resolution  (to be viewed later in the built-in Pictures hub of any Windows Phone 7).
• Take a picture with the phone’s camera and upload it to the server.
• Upload any picture that is stored in the Pictures hub of the phone to the server.

Videos

The “Videos” feature allows you to discover and view videos that are stored on your server in the Videos shared folder.

Even though discoverable by this feature, the variety of video formats is high and not all formats can be streamed. For details about which video formats can be streamed from the server and accepted by the phone, see Supported Media Codecs for Windows Phone.

 

For further information, and access to the downloads to start testing today please visit the SBS Connect Site, or WHS Connect site depending on your product.

Please note this is a release candidate and as such is for testing purposes only.  Link Back to the Official SBS Blog Post.

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Happy New Year, what’s in store for you in 2011

First off, I wanted to wish all my followers a very happy new year.  2011 is shaping up to be a killer year for small businesses.  There is so much new Microsoft technology coming out to make business more efficient, it’s hard to keep tabs on it all.  I also wanted to apologize to my followers about my lack of posts.  I’ve just returned from a 5 week paternity leave and before that, I was getting my stuff in order.

First, Windows Small Business Server 2011 Standard edition as Released to Manufacturing (RTM!).  This release is pretty exciting and signifies a number of different milestones both internal to our team, and external to the public.  Let’s focus on the external. 

SBS 2011 Standard offers small businesses a completely on premise solution to run their business, including the new Exchange Server 2010 with SP1, SharePoint Foundation Services 2010, and the coveted Server 2008 R2 base operating system, bringing security to a new level.  If you’re familiar with SBS 2008, then you’re in luck, because this product brings a bunch of new functionality, but the learning curve will be super short for you, but it still has enough meat in the product to keep it interesting.

For example, the New and Enhanced features of SBS 2011 Standard are:

• Windows Server 2008 R2 Standard as the base OS, with it’s added security and speed over the 2008 base platform
• Exchange Server 2010, with SP1 brings greater reliability and performance to your small business.  In addition to many additional features like resource sharing (my personal favorite)
• SharePoint Foundation 2010 makes using SharePoint even easier!
• WSUS 3.0 with SP2 to help you manage patches with ease
• The new version of Remote Web Access (formerly Remote Web Workplace), with movable widgets.
• A redesigned http://companyweb
• Improvements into automated domain management
• An updated Best Practice Analyzer (BPA)

So it’ll be a few short weeks more before you can get your hands on this baby, just keep in mind the system requirements if you’re already procuring a machine for it.  Exchange needs more RAM than you’d probably think about it.

And coming the first half of this year, is the highly anticipated Windows Small Business Server 2011, which ties to Office 365, a true hybrid in the server market.  You can obtain the public beta for SBS 2011 Essentials here (with a new public preview coming soon!).

Also coming this year is Windows Storage server codename “Breckenridge”, which provides a client backup engine for your SBS 2011 Standard or SBS 2008 installs.  It’s like a win-win situation in 2011.

Finally, for media hounds, Windows Home Server “Vail” is coming as well, which uses Silverlight to stream videos and pictures out to the web, or DLNA 2.0 to stream it inside your home, backup your home PCs, your server.

All three of the above will also leverage an ecosystem of add-ins to extend the functionality of the server of your choice.  As I said, an exciting 2011.

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Simplify your Client Story with Windows MultiPoint Server 2011!

Back in February of 2010, Microsoft launched a new product, called Windows MultiPoint Server 2010, which is designed primarily for the education market to help schools increase computing access to more students for a lower total cost. Today the public beta of 2011 is available for you to try.

As an IT Consultant, why should you care?

If you look at the solution, MultiPoint can actually reduce the TCO (Total Cost of Ownership) of clients in a small business.  Much of the hard work of running products like Windows Small Business Server Codename “Aurora” and Windows Small Business Server Codename “SBS7” is dealing with client computers, keeping them patched and secure.  Typically in a small business each employee might have one sometimes two computers to manage.  With the release of MultiPoint Server 2011, you can reduce the number of clients in your infrastructure that need maintaining, while keeping (or if you choose, increasing) the number of virtual workstations via terminal services.  Using Terminal Services in App Sharing mode, and normal clients takes some of the risk away, but you still have to worry about patching those “thin” clients.  With MultiPoint server, you simply just patch the server and you’re done.  Simply join it to your “Aurora” or “SBS7” domain, and let your users log in to the MultiPoint server.

So what’s new with Windows MultiPoint Server 2011? We’ve been listening to customer and partner feedback and here are some of the new things you’ll find:

1. Desktop thumbnails that make it easier for teachers to orchestrate activities across the classroom, see what students are working on, and interact with student sessions.
   
2. Support for connecting thin clients over the LAN. This allows for virtually unlimited distances between stations.
   
3. The ability to string multiple MultiPoint Server “pods” and manage them from a unified MultiPoint Manager console. Great for labs and libraries where there are a large number of stations in a single place.
   
4. Split screen capabilities at each user station. Turn one screen into two separate stations for a new way of collaborative learning between students.
   
5. An ISV extensibility model based on a common SDK with the next versions of Windows Small Business Server and Windows Home Server, which enables ISVs such as learning and classroom management providers to integrate with MultiPoint Server.
   
6. Support for domain join to integrate Windows MultiPoint Server with your existing Active Directory infrastructure.

If your organization is struggling with providing enough computers for your users, decreasing technology budgets, limited technical support and outdated hardware and software, I encourage you to check out Windows MultiPoint Server 2010 today and to take a look at the enhancements we are thinking about for through the now available Windows MultiPoint Server 2011 beta.

You can read the official public blog post here, on the SBS blog.  Or if you’d rather jump right in, try out the Beta!

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Small Business Server 7–Interview with Björn Levidow

Björn Levidow, Group Program Manager for SBS, tells us about some of the new enhancements in the next version of Windows Small Business Server 2008 (SBS 2008), currently called "SBS 7" for short. You can download the SBS 7 Preview by going to this Connect site.

Full video & comments on Technet Edge.

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Windows Small Business Server “7” Released to Public Beta

This morning Microsoft released the Windows Small Business Server “7” release to Beta.  This marks yet another major milestone for the Windows Server Solutions Team, now releasing both the Windows Home Server “Vail”, and Windows Small Business Server Hybrid Edition “Aurora” into beta.

SBS 7 marks a major release in the *next* set of all-on-premise solutions.  Updates include:

• Base OS is updated to Windows Server 2008 R2
• Exchange is updated to Exchange 2010 SP1
• SharePoint is updated to Microsoft SharePoint Foundation 2010
• Windows Software Update Services is updated
• The new Remote Web Access (RWA) experience is newer (and matches Aurora!)
• Bug fixes
• etc

You can try out the new SBS “7” beta by pointing your favorite browser to the SBS Connect site, or jump straight to the downloads page.  Don’t forget if you need help, or find an issue to give us feedback, or talk about it in the Newsgroups.

More details can be found on the Official SBS blog.

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Try out Windows Server Codename “Aurora” and a new version of Windows Server Codename “Vail”

Today is a special day, because not one, but TWO products make it to public beta.  The Small Business Server mystery sku known as “Aurora” and the next public beta of the Home Server sku, known as “Vail”.  It’s official once it’s on the official blog!

Vail, you’re probably familiar with (if not just a little bit) as it’s been in public beta for a while, but this version has more stuff!  For example, you can now change users passwords, or set a password policy, or even change the password of the home server!  An a lot of the bugs and reports that you, our beta testers have submitted, are now fixed

Aurora is the new server, you’re probably not familiar with

Aurora is a light weight version that provides the essentials of what a business needs.  You know, data security, protection, backup, access.  All that good stuff.  You might notice that Vail and Aurora have similar consoles, that’s on purpose.  The base platform of the system is similar in nature, but Aurora uses the Active Directory to store it’s users so you can have that single sign-on and user management experience you’ve become familiar with in a business.  It also has shares, and PC backup, and the familiar remote access webpage, now coined “Remote Web Access”.

I’m planning on a series of posts over the next week to get you acquainted with “Aurora”, but for now, you should get started!

As always, Aurora is available over on the Microsoft Connect Website, and so is Vail.  Remember to test it out, beat it up, and file those bugs.  Now’s the time to make sure your business or customer’s business can be fully operational on Aurora, so let us know if it’s not, we want to hear from you!

More details about Vail public preview 2

More details about Aurora public preview

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Discovering Windows Server Codename “Aurora”

HP has teamed up with Becky Och’s, one of our Senior Program managers on the team to talk about what’s in Windows Server Codename ”Aurora”, the new cloud integrated version of Small Business Server.  Becky recorded a short video with the HP Coffee Coaching team to get you up to speed.  As with all Coffee Coaching videos, this one is 4 minutes, which makes it a great video to get up to speed on “Aurora” while you’re wolfing down your morning coffee.

Jump into Coffee Coaching and get more great videos from HP and Microsoft on “Aurora” and other Small Business Products: http://www.facebook.com/CoffeeCoaching

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Guy Haycock discusses the SMB Announcements at WPC 2010

Up on VarVid.tv, Aaron managed to get our Product Planner, Guy Haycock, on camera talking about the announcements of “Aurora” and “SBS7”.

Source Video: http://varvid.tv/2010/microsofts-guy-haycock-discusses-the-smb-announcements-at-wpc-2010/#ooid=puNDRrMTrKPQKyx6UJhYGs_eUWh4s8sn

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Windows Server Codename “Aurora” Video Walkthrough

Wow, over on WeGotServed, Terry found an awesome video that talks about Aurora from our very own Michael Leworthy, product planner for SBS. He talks about the differences between “SBS7” and “Aurora”, and why you might want Aurora over SBS7

Source is We Got Served.

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Announcing the next releases of Windows Small Business Server

Today we (as in our fearless leader Kevin Kean) pulled the lid off what our team has been working on for the past few years. Two new versions of Windows Small Business Server. That’s right. TWO new versions.

From a traditional standpoint, we’ve continued the single-server mantra with Windows Small Business Server “SBS7”. This version includes updates to all the major products in SBS, such as Windows Server 2008 R2, Exchange Server 2010 SP1, SharePoint 2010 Foundation, WSUS 3.0, and SQL 2008 R2 (with Premium edition). These new versions provide our customers with security and management. We also included a brand-spanking new version of Remote Web Workplace! This version of SBS will continue to support the familiar 75 users

The second version, code named Windows Small Business Server “Aurora” is the new edition of SBS. It’s cheaper than SBS7, and is even a lighter weight “first server” option for small businesses as is a hybrid server delivering both on premise services, as well integrates with the cloud. It also includes PC Backup, and server backup/restore capabilities. The same new version of Remote Web Workplace! This version of SBS will support up to 25 users.

“Aurora” also brings a key new functionality of add-ins to drive integration between new and existing on-line services with Aurora. Developers can find the SDK on Connect. We have been working with a lot of partners with SBS Aurora such as Symantec, Level Platforms and Disk Keeper are all making statements this week around plans to integrate products with SBS Aurora. HP is not only showing SBS Aurora in their booth at the Microsoft Worldwide Partner Conference, but has a sneak peek at http://www.facebook.com/CoffeeCoaching. And you’re sure to hear more as we get closer to releasing the preview.

You can sign-up to be notified when the Preview of these servers are available over on the SBS Connect website.

It’s nice to finally be able to talk about the products I’ve been working on for the last number of years!

[Official Blog Post on the Official SBS Blog]

[First discovered review of SBS7 and Aurora, by Paul Thurrott]

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How Developers “Extended” the Vail Launchpad

If you’re a developer and you’re interested in writing something for Windows sHome Server, our Lead Developer Dileep has another tip for you on how to extend the Vail launch pad.  Dileep has had a previous post on the location of the SDK for Vail and how you can get involved.

Most recently, Dileep appeared back on the Home Server blog with how to extend the launchpad, and when you should extend the Launchpad.  You can read that blog post here.

If you haven’t been on the forums already, I did a forum post on why we created the Launchpad, with feedback from you, the customer.  Dileep extended on this, copied here for your reading convenience.

What is Launchpad?

Launchpad is a light weight and extensible client-based user interface that we built for Vail. It was born out of a couple of pain points that our customers experienced from Home Server v1. While Home Server v1 provided the ability for developers to add what we call ‘administrative’ or ‘server management’ tasks to the Admin console, it did not provide any means by which a day-to-day or non-administrative task could be presented to users in a coherent manner that resonates its association with Home Server. As a result we started seeing add-ins for day-to-day consumption of home server capabilities that were deployed to Admin Console, but did not belong there since they were not administrative tasks. We realized that there is a need for providing a coherent and consistent grouping as well as entry point for home server related tasks that everyone in the household can perform from their client PCs. This was the first pain point.

The second one, and perhaps the more significant one of the two, was the limitation around having matching usernames and passwords on the server and the PCs. If you recall, in Home Server v1 we require users to create user accounts on the server that had the same username and password as that of the client PCs so that they can seamlessly access the shared folders on the server as soon as they login to their PCs. This generated lot of confusion with consumers, as was evident from the feedback that we got. With Vail, Launchpad acts as the login UI for signing the user onto the server, thereby granting them access to the Server shares and other platform services exposed via the SDK. We no longer have the requirement to have the user accounts matching on server and client, instead users can use Launchpad to ‘sign-in’ to the server with any user account and password combination that was set up in Dashboard!

In short, Launchpad serves the following purposes:

1. It is the entry point for the day-to-day tasks related to Windows Home Server from the client PCs.

2. It eliminates the need for matching usernames and passwords setup between server and client, and eliminates the password sync dialogs.

3. It Provides a logical and centralized location where all home server related tasks are exposed, resulting in much better awareness of home server and its capabilities.

4. It allows everyone in the household to have visibility to developers' add-ins, than just home server administrators.

So, if you’re a developer, head on over to Dileep’s full post, and start coding up some cool apps that will make users love your add-in, and increase the value of Vail.  I know I’ll appreciate it when we ship!

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Calling All Developers–Windows Home Server “Vail” needs you!

A few weeks ago, we released the Home Server codename “Vail” public preview.  Along with that came a software development kit.  Like Windows Home Server version 1, the product is extensible, and we need add-in developers!!  We’ve put a great deal of effort into the improvement of the extensibility of the product. 

Over on the Home Server blog, Dileep, our Development Lead talks about how to jump in and get engaged.  Keep your eye on the official blog for updates as it is a planned series to help you get involved.  If you want to jump straight to the SDK, you can download the complete set of information here (You will have to sign in to Microsoft Connect site).  Any questions can be posted in the developer forum.

UPDATE: See what others are saying about the SDK.

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Windows Home Server “Vail” Drive Extender V2–New Features

Mark Vayman, a lead program manager on the Home and Small Business Server team just tossed out all the new features in Windows Home Server Drive Extender, version 2.  The information and discussion can be found in the Microsoft Forums, and I urge you to surf on over there and jump into the conversation with questions and comments.

Drive Extender is a storage technology first introduced in Windows Home Server's first release. The 1st generation of the technology was file based, and worked on top of "vanilla" NTFS volumes using reparse points. To address the customer feedback we have received and improve the system's resiliency to partial drive failures (seen many times by our support), the Drive Extender technology was updated to use block based storage below the file system similar to software RAID systems.

The following isn't an exhaustive list, but does try to enumerate the major new features as well as features which are no longer supported in the “Vail” version of Drive Extender:

Features carried over from the previous release:

• Duplication can be turned on/off per folder.
• Duplicated folders can survive a single hard drive failure.
• Storage pool can be easily expanded using different drive types and various sizes.
• Graphical representation of storage usage (AKA the pie chart) - isn't present in the beta, but is planned for the next milestone.

New/Improved features:

• For duplicated folders, data is duplicated in real time to two separate drives - there is no hourly migration pass.
• File system level encryption (EFS) and compression are now supported for Drive Extender folders.
• File conflicts are gone, duplication works as intended for files in use as it is performed at the block level now.
• The remaining amount of data to synchronize/duplicate is reported per storage pool.
• All storage operations are executed in the background without blocking other server operations. Specifically, drive removal can be issued without impacting the online state of shares.
• Drives in a storage pool can be named with a custom description to enable physical identification of the drive in the server.
• Drive serial number and exact connection type is reported for each drive.
• Drives which are bigger than 2TB can be added  to a storage pool.
• iSCSI storage devices can be added to the a storage pool.
• The system drive can be excluded from the storage pool.
• A new low-level storage check and repair diagnostic operation was added.
• All storage operations are performed with very low I/O priority to ensure they don't interfere with media streaming.
• A new "folder repair" operation is available which runs “chkdsk” on the folder's volume.
• To protect against silent storage errors (bit flips, misdirected writes, torn writes), additional information is appended to each 512-byte sector stored on drive. In particular, each sector is protected by a CRC checksum, which enables Drive Extender to detect data read errors, perform real-time error correction and self-healing (up to 2 bit errors per sector if duplication is disabled, and any number of bit errors if duplication is enabled) and report the errors back to the user and application. The overhead for this additional data is roughly 12% of drive space.
• Data drives in storage pools can be migrated between servers, and appear as a non-default pool.  A non-default pool can be promoted to a default pool if no default pool exists.

Deprecated features:

• A data drive from a storage pool cannot be read on machine not running the “Vail” server software.
• Data isn't rebalanced across drives to ensure even distribution. The data allocation attempts to keep drives evenly used. A periodic rebalance operation is considered for the next version.

Known inter-op/support issues with the Beta

• As with other software RAID solutions, Drive Extender isn't supported with BitLocker.
• Drive Extender cannot share the same drive with other software based RAID systems (such as Microsoft Dynamic Drives)
• Running low-level software storage tools—for example, defragmentation, full drive encryption, or volume imaging—on server folders may cause issues. These tools have not been fully tested in this release. Please avoid running these tools on the server.
• Internally, the “Vail” software has been tested with up to 16 hard drives and with up to 16 TB of total storage capacity. We’re aware of a number of bugs that occur beyond these limits, so please keep your beta installations under 16 drives and 16 TB total drive space.

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Windows Home Server Codename “Vail” Public Beta Available Today!

Today is an exciting day for me.  As you know, one of the products I work on is Windows Home Server.  Today we’re excited to announce that the next version of Windows Home Server (codename “Vail”) is available for you to try.  This is a BETA release, and while it may seem like you want to switch to it as your actual home server, we want to remind you that it’s still not sanctioned for production usage, because it just hasn’t gone through the hours of testing needed for us to feel confident that it’s rock solid.  Plus we’re still adding features!

What we do want to do with the Beta release, is get the public pounding away on all of our features, but most importanly our PC Backup and our new version of Drive Extender! We invite everyone to check it out by downloading the software from the Microsoft Connect site. (English language builds are available now).  If you don’t have extra hardware, Vail installs flawlessly into Hyper-V based environments and one of our MVPS already has a blog post on how to install it into VMWare.

What’s new?

• Extending media streaming outside the home or office
• Multi-PC backup and restore
• Simplified setup and user experience
• Expanded development and customization tools for partners

A Short Demo of the new features is available on Youtube

Before we go too much further, however, we want to pass along a couple of very important hardware-related tips on installing the Vail Beta:

1. In Vail, we’re moving to a new underlying server platform that will only run as a 64-bit OS. We do not recommend running Vail on a 32-bit PC or existing Windows Home Server systems (even 64-bit Home Server systems) because there may be compatibility issues with some OEM drivers.
2. Since it is still in ‘beta,’ please install the Vail code on a secondary computer as opposed to existing Windows Home Server v1 OEM systems (not even 64-bit systems) If you do install the beta on an existing system, you may experience a number of problems, including the inability to run WHS v1 add-in applications (even those provided by OEMs). Installing on a secondary machine will help ensure the best possible user experience, and we would like your feedback on what this scenario is like.
3. Installation of the Vail OS on a PC will also require users to wipe all data from that PC or device.
4. The hardware requirements for Vail call for a 1.4 GHz x64 processor, 1 GB RAM, and at least one160 GB hard drive. Full details and additional requirements will be posted on the Microsoft Connect download site.

Also, if you are a developer, this beta includes a new software development kit (SDK) that gives developers and partners even more ways to customize the OS and add new functionality and services to Windows Home Servers. Download the SDK here.

Finally, before you start filing bugs, some features yet to come are:

• Changing a users password
• Changing your home server password
  

Please refer to the official home server blog for the official announcement.

We look forward to hearing your feedback.  Please open issues and discuss on the Connect Website.

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