The Windows Home Server Team announced yesterday that over 40,000 people have now applied to join the beta. The amount of interest in WHS is incredible, seeing as this was a product very few people knew about until CES in January.
A lot of the guys from the Longhorn Server beta have now been added to the WHS beta, and that’s fuelling a lot of healthy debate over at the public beta forums, not to mention increasing the bug count!
To date, the team reports that 10,000 people have now been invited to join the beta, out of which 5686 have downloaded a product key from Connect.
I have completely no idea what’s up with the other 4300 people who applied and then haven’t bothered to download their key. A I mentioned in a previous post, it’s very much a percentages game when it comes to beta invites, which is a shame. Still, it looks like another batch of invites will be going out soon, so if you don’t have an invite yet, keep an eye on your inbox.
Oh, and thanks to the team for the link!
February 25th, 2007 at 9:05 pm
Hi Terry,
Love the blog. following reading your post above, I think that many people who are on the beta are in the sam boat as I am. I.e. we are not made of money, and are looking into getting hardware to install WHS on. Once I have some hardware, there will be one less tester that will need to get a product key, as I wil have it installed straight away…
Kepp up the good work!!!
Paul
February 25th, 2007 at 11:13 pm
Hi Paul
Hope you’re well - keep an eye on what hardware people are posting about. I reckon you can get a system really cheaply via ebay - there’s no need for high specs…
Glad you’re liking the blog!
Terry
March 1st, 2007 at 2:34 pm
i too am just getting my hardware together before i install. a question since this is my first time beta testing: what happens after 365 days (or whatever) and i have my network completely dependant on WHS and i find i cant live without it? do they make it so beta’s overlap so i can easily go to the next one? or will the final be available for purchase before the last beta expires? i can see becoming totally dependant on this if it works well so i want to make sure how dependant i should really allow myself to get, i dont want to find i only have a few days left before i have to suck everything off it before it expires.
March 1st, 2007 at 9:50 pm
Hi,
No information has been made publically available about when post-Beta 2 releases will be issued. From previous experience, you’re generally asked to format your hard drives and install new beta releases as a “clean install”.
In terms of release, there has been talk of WHS being released sometime in the Summer on newly purchased OEM machines. Nothing has been publically mentioned regarding a “self-build” final release, so I’d ensure you have a migration strategy in place if you want to become dependent on WHS at this stage.