Weekends are for fun and relaxation. As I was pulling up some music to listen to via my Xbox 360 last Saturday morning, it occurred to me that I've been running Windows Home Server for quite awhile now. In fact, last Saturday was the 100th day I'd had Home Server running on my home network. So I thought I'd share some of the ups and downs I've had over that time with Home Server.

What I Dig

Hardware Requirements: I have a decent PC that I build about four years ago in my home office. By "decent" I mean that it is adequate for accessing and storing data, being a print server and some gaming. Very solids, but nothing spectacular, but let's face it, it's freaking four years old.

The basic specs are:

• P4 2.4 GHz
• 512 MB SD RAM
• Basic, non-brand name 64MB display card

I had a 20 GB hard drive already installed serving as the system partition and I bought and installed a 220 GB ATA drive (yeah, the system board is too old for SATA) for content. And that's it. Pretty basic.

The OS absolutely screams on this hardware. As it is mainly managing content and backups on your home network, Home Server doesn't need a lot of horsepower to provide reasonable performance. I know that several PC vendors are selling preconfigured machines for Home Server, which is cool, but you can just as easily build yourself a machine for very little money and get comparable performance. Just be sure to get yourself a big and fast drive for storing content. Disc space is cheap and you'll be glad you have the extra room once you start doing backups of the other machines on your network.

Reliability: Home Server just runs and runs and runs. I've only had to shut it down a couple of times and that was because I was heading out of town for a week or so with the family and I usually power everything down if it's not going to be used for an extended period of time. As it's built on top of Windows 2003 Server, the reliability isn't surprising, but welcome just the same.

Remote Management Console: Home Server comes with a client-side application that does a few things. For one, it registers your machine with the Home Server automatically, facilitating automated back-ups primarily. It also provides you with a handy management console application that will let you manage the machines on your home network, configure automated back-ups, setup and manage user accounts on the Home Server, configure shared directories for music, videos, etc. and check the current status of your server drives and your network as a whole.

While those of us who work with servers all the time could do this any number of ways. One of the risks of creating a home server is that non-technical consumers who still struggle to print Word 2007 documents with the new tool ribbon will be completely lost when it comes to server configuration. The Home Server management console makes this very easy and, for those of us who could manage it from the command line, it provides a very efficient means of making necessary changes and then getting out, all without having to log directly into the console. Nice!

What's more, you can configure Home Server to be accessible from outside your home network as well, providing you with access to your files and data ever when you're away from home. Nice nice!

What I Don't Dig So Much

No Support Media Center Extender: This just made me sad. As Media Center ships standard with Vista Home and up now, it seems like bundling some flavor of the Media Center management interface into Home Server would have been a no-brainer. But alas, it is no where to be found. It is easy enough to connect my Xbox to the shared content directories on the Home Server, but I have really come to like the Media Center user interface as it appears in Vista. It was so simple, my six-year-old could cycle through available movies and pick something out. Now I have to do it for her because the files names can be a little cryptic to someone her age.

I guess I'm not looking for full-blown Media Center on Home Server, just the ability for other Media Center PCs and devices to interact with it like Media Center. Is that so much to ask? Honestly, this is my only complaint, but it's a significant one.

Better Off Than a Hundred Days Ago?

My hope when I installed Home Server was that I would get all the benefits I'd come to enjoy from Media Center with the added bonuses of network and backup management in Home Server. As it turns out, the latter set of features are what I've benefited from the most. What would make Home Server a grand slam instead of a double would be to provide me with the means of not only storing my media files, but to manage and access them much the way Media Center does. If this were there, I'd be hard pressed to think of anything else you'd have to do to this product to make it better.

The International Organization for Standardization, or ISO (yeah, I can't figure out that acronym either), posted a press release on their web site Tuesday  announcing that ISO/IES DIS 29500, or Office Open XML, received well more than the minimum number of votes by the international community to become an official ISO standard. While ISO has not officially approved Open XML as an international standard, it received 86% approval, well above the 66.6% needed for approval.

Open XML may very well be one of the most significant recent technical standards that you haven't heard much about. For a starter course with links out to important resources, check out this post I did a couple of weeks ago on this very subject.

The official Microsoft statement on the ratification comes from Tom Robertson, General Manager of Interoperability and Standards:

With 86 percent of voting national bodies supporting ratification, there is overwhelming support for Open XML. This outcome is a clear win for customers, technology providers and governments that want to choose the format that best meets their needs and have a voice in the evolution of this widely adopted standard. The input from the technical experts, customers and governments around the world has greatly improved the Open XML specification and will make it even more useful to developers and customers. Once it is formally approved, we are committed to supporting this specification in our products, and we will continue to work with standards bodies, governments and the industry to promote greater interoperability and innovation.

Open XML has been an open standard for years. In fact, a slew of software vendors already support it their products. These products include Microsoft Office (2007, 2003, XP, 2000), OpenOffice Novel Edition, Gnumeric, Neo-Office 2.1, WordPerfect 2007 and the PalmOS.

This ratification is important to developers and architects worldwide. The standardization of word processing, spreadsheet and presentation documents will:

1. Provides customers with much more choice -- they can make software purchasing solutions based not on existing file formats, but which office productivity software has the best features for the best price.
2. Allow developers can create applications on the desktop, the server and mobile devices that generate documents that they know, with confidence, will be readily consumed by their information workers' software.

In very much the same way we look to standards-based technologies like web services to allow us to interoperate between systems built to run on different platforms, developers and architects must begin to think the same way about business documents. Adoption of Open XML allows technology providers to focus on building the best software solution possible without having to worry about the formatting minutia of multiple different consuming applications.

And how can that be a bad thing?

At both the Kansas City and Minneapolis Windows Server/Visual Studio/SQL Server product launches, I've presented a breakout session called Creating Instantly Recognizable Application with the Microsoft Office System. It has given me a really good opportunity to dig into developing custom applications in the Office client applications as well as customizing SharePoint Server and, ultimately, tying the two systems together to create a true "software plus service" solution. I have to say, this stuff absolutely rocks!

One thing I've learned in the past several weeks is that is has never been easier to develop, test and deploy MOSS applications. There are several reasons for this:

• Visual Studio Tools for Office (VSTO) is integrated into Visual Studio 2008 and offers a very rich set of project types for all the Office products
• VSTO provides a SharePoint workflow project type -- this is the same as a typical Workflow Foundation project (SharePoint uses WF as its workflow engine) except that it has all the SharePoint specific hooks built in that allows for one-click deployment and debugging
• For Office 2007 applications, VSTO now provides a visual design tool for ribbon add-in applications
• The developer experience for building Office Business Applications (OBAs) is exactly the same as building any other WinForm or ASP.NET application in Visual Studio

If you've developed an application in Visual Studio before, you can have an OBA application up and running in virtually no time. If you want to get some hands-on experience from the professionals, I'm glad to let you know that there will be a MOSS Camp in St. Louis this coming Saturday, April 5th. To get all the details, including the topics for the day, check out the announcement post on Clint Edmonson's web site. This is a community driven event being given my the St. Louis SharePoint User Group.