We Got Served

A few weeks ago, I invited readers of WGS to submit any questions they had for the Windows Home Server team. Questions were submitted from all over the world, and I’m delighted to say that the team have come back with detailed and candid responses, including a lot of news for the community, including:

• A new Windows Home Server update in November
• Details on the forthcoming release cycle for the product, including news of Windows Home Server UR1 (Update Rollup 1)
• Discussion on x64 support, an alpha x64 WHS Connector and news that Windows XP64 will not be supported by Windows Home Server

Todd Headrick, Joel Sider and Charlie Kindel all took part in the Q&A - you’ve read their posts on the WHS blog, and now you have the chance to find out a little more about their thoughts on WHS v1 development, and aspirations for the future. I’ll let them introduce themselves via the first question.

Q: Okay, so to kick off, please introduce yourself, your job title and tell us a little bit about your role.

Todd: Todd Headrick, Product Planner. I am an original member of the Home Server team that researched the market possibilities, helped define the product vision, and determined customer requested features and functionality.

Charlie: Charlie Kindel is the General Manager for Windows Home Server. He hired Todd and told him what to do.

Joel: Joel Sider is the Senior Product Manager for Windows Home Server. I drive communications about the product with press, analysts and the community.

Q: Describe a typical day in your role on the team.

Todd: There is really no such thing as a typical day. There is tremendous variety in my day – but there are always a few meetings and a bunch of email! I am marketing’s liaison to the engineering team, meaning I work closely with both teams. On the development side I help drive decisions and plans around product capabilities and features, and how they can best meet the needs of customers. On the marketing side, I help the team understand how to communicate the product’s benefits on the web, at events, through PR, etc. I sometimes work with partners and I do a lot of communications and coordination with other teams inside Microsoft. I also do a lot of work on our community programs and am a primary contributor to the team blog.

Joel: Like Todd says, a lot of meetings and email! In general, I try to determine the when and how of communicating news and information about Home Server to the media and other audiences that influence our customers. I’m part of the marketing team and take on a lot of the product spokesperson duties in press interviews and analyst briefings. I am responsible for driving our public announcements and the PR activities at events – which means plenty of coordination with the product and marketing teams, as well as partners, customers and other teams at MSFT.

Charlie:In shipping V1 my days were spent very deeply engaged with the engineering team building the product. We had daily (sometimes more) “ship-room” meetings that I almost never missed. I would generally install every daily build and do ad-hoc testing on one of the four or five WHS boxes I have in my office and at home; this would result in me filing bugs which in turn led to helping developers and testers reproduce and fix. I spent a lot of time engaging with the community of WHS testers ensuring the team had the pulse of the community. I regularly consulted with feature teams on designs and issues. And I spent a lot of time with our marketing team putting together our go to market strategy and plans.

These days I am spending most of my time working on getting the team transitioned from being a “ship V1 at all cost” effort into a sustainable long term product team. This involves thinking through and communicating our strategy, vision, and execution plans. I spend a lot of time with other Microsoft teams putting together plans for collaboration in the future. We now have our first “paying customers” for the product and I try to lead the team by example in keeping my “ear to the ground” listening for product feedback. I do this by monitoring the support channels, reading the blogosphere, and watching news feeds. Occasionally I get an itch to do a team blog post as well…

Q: What is your vision for WHS - where do you personally want to see WHS in the future? (Kinda like Bill Gates saying that he would love to see Media Center in every living room). Tony Sutton, Norfolk, UK

Todd: From our internal Windows Home Server Vision document:

Windows Home Server will define the category for home servers and will deliver significant end user benefits to consumer households by delivering highly refined end-to-end solutions while at the same time being a rich platform for 3rd party innovation.

Windows Home Server will help OEMs and System Builders deliver a tightly integrated hardware & software product providing rich out of the box solutions for consumers by being a dedicated, always-available node on the home network. The Windows Home Server business will grow through the expansion of geographies, channels, and market segments as well as new capabilities in the product. The Windows Home Server platform will enable Microsoft and third parties to create a rich ecosystem of software, hardware, and services that take advantage of the inherent simplicity and strength of a server based home network.

Q: Which market (geographical) do you think has the biggest potential for Windows Home Server and why? Christoph Dommermuth, Kiel, Germany

Todd: The target market for a home server solution is households with a broadband connection and more than 1 personal computer. Broadband penetration is growing worldwide with over 220 million households with a broadband connection, and over 60 million households with 2 or more PCs and a broadband connection. The top 3 countries are USA, Japan and Germany, but other countries are not far behind, including Korea, China, United Kingdom, France, Netherlands, Italy, Australia, Brazil, etc. Certainly the U.S. market has great potential because of its size and general enthusiasm for computing and consumer electronics, but we’ve definitely seen a great deal of excitement throughout the world for this product, with over half of the beta participants coming from outside of the USA. We had people from over 110 different countries sign-up for the Windows Home Server Beta.

Q: What’s your perspective on the new community that has sprung up around WHS? Have there been any surprises for you in this area?

Todd: The grassroots enthusiasm around Windows Home Server has exceeded our expectations. We didn’t anticipate the response we got to happen so early. I think the excitement and level of engagement – both inside our programs and what’s happening independently (like We Got Served!) – attest to the need and demand for a product like Windows Home Server. One thing we hoped for, but weren’t positive we’d see, was the teamwork we’ve had with the community. We made a commitment early on to be very transparent in our development, and in response the community has been a real partner throughout the engineering and testing process.

Q: How difficult was WHS to develop? From the outside, it looks like you were always clear on your target user and identified the feature set relatively quickly, but there are some major software innovations in the product (e.g. Drive Extender) that must have taken a lot of work (or surely we’d have seen them in other recent OS releases, right?) What were the major sticking points along the development path?

Todd: We have an amazing team and yes, in general, we’ve been able to achieve what we set out to achieve on schedule. There was a lot of work and “passionate debate” about the product goals and feature set prior to public disclosure at CES, of course. The pre-CES path was very necessary, but it probably wasn’t as straight as the post-CES path.

Windows Home Server is developed by the Windows Server Solutions Group, and in that regard we are a product designed explicitly to meet the needs of a specific customer segment. By having this focus, it made it easier to make some of the harder design decisions, in that we know that we don’t have to support thousands of users or thousands of PCs. The Drive Extender technology was developed and jointly integrated by a team in Microsoft’s Advanced Technology Lab and the Windows Home Server storage team. It took a lot of work, but due to the predictive nature of the Windows Home Server solution, some design decisions were simpler since we were incorporating the Drive Extender technology into a “headless” home server solution.

Q: CES in January was a big watershed moment in telling the world about Windows Home Server. At the show, you showed off a number of reference designs from OEMs – the hockey puck and the HP hardware in particular caught the eye. How much development did you do together with partners such as HP ahead of CES and after?

Todd: We are lucky to have a partner like HP that shared our vision early on and was eager to work with us on the development of a complete, hardware-software solution. Obviously there was a fair amount of coordination and joint work with HP prior to CES. Since then we’ve worked closely with our other hardware partners and have defined the Windows Home Server logo program, which specifies what OEMs need to provide with their devices, e.g. headless functionality, no CD or DVD drives, external USB ports, indicator lights, etc. It’s exciting to see the innovation happening at companies like Medion, Fujitsu-Siemens, and other hardware partners.

Q: What is your personal favourite feature of WHS v1? Ben

Charlie: That’s a tough one to answer. I am so incredibly proud of the team and he product we have produced that having to pick a favorite feature is like having to pick my favorite child. I think my favorite thing about the product is that we really did succeed in building software that provides real solutions for customers, not just “features”. That’s really hard to do, but we pulled it off. I guess if I had to really one favorite “feature” I’d say “nothing”. That is, it just works; my family and I don’t actually “use” Windows Home Server. It’s just there, out of sight, out of mind, doing stuff for us. Heck, my wife doesn’t even really know what it does. I love that because the list of technology products I’ve brought home and forced upon her that she got really fed up with is pretty long.

Joel:The peace of mind knowing my PCs are all backed up is great. Sharing pics with extended family via remote access is fun, too. But my favorite is probably streaming photos and music to Xbox. I love perusing through all of our vacation photos on the big screen with my 4 year old.

Todd:It really depends on the day of week. I sleep well at night knowing that all of my PCs are getting backed up every night. I like using my remote access site (with WHISST) to share some photos with my family and friends. And I like that my wife can use our ROKU Soundbridge to play the music stored on the home server through the old stereo in the family room. I like coming home after work and the music is playing. She now rips all of the CDs to the home server by default.

Q: Which is your favourite feature that got dropped from WHS v1? Ben

Todd: Too many to list. As the product planner you help develop a long list of scenarios / features that you would like to see the product deliver sometime over the next 1-10 years. The list gets narrowed based on customer research and technology investments that the team feels are important. As the customer advocate, I am keenly aware of the feedback from the community and what people are asking for. Some features are easier to add than others, some things are easy to develop and easy to test, other things that seem simple on the outside may be easy to develop but incredibly hard to test. And throughout the process, there is a tension between the number of resources you have on the team, and the desire to get the product to market.

The one feature that I really wanted was Remote Streaming of my media content, which will be available through the WebGuide for Windows Home Server sometime in the future. As the Code2Fame Challenge was getting announced, Doug Berret posted a beta version of WebGuide for Windows Home Server. This beta is still available from his site. At this time, there is not a formal date for when a final version of WebGuide for Windows Home Server will be available. We are excited about Doug joining the Windows Media Center team and WebGuide becoming a great solution for Windows Media Center customers today and for Windows Home Server customers sometime in the future.

Charlie: Probably parental controls. Centrally managed, uniformly applied, policies that would help me and my wife ensure our kids are not being exposed to things they shouldn’t be is a great concept.

Q: Support for x64 home computers has obviously been a big challenge for the team. Could you explain how tricky this issue has been?

Todd: The challenge really comes down to resources and priorities It had been our intention all along to provide great x64 home computer support in v1 of Windows Home Server.

As some of you may know, one of the great things about the x64 versions of Windows is the WOW64 layer that enables almost every 32 bit application to “just work”. It is quite amazing, actually. For our small product group, being able to ride on the shoulders of giants by running our 32 bit code under WOW64 enables us to be very efficient. Up until late last year our solution was working great on x64 Vista in this manner.

However, as we were preparing Windows Home Server Beta 2 in December we discovered that the Vista team, right before it released, had made a change to the Volume Snapshot Services that broke ALL 32 bit applications trying to use VSS on the x64 versions of the operating system. They made this change to fix another bug that they deemed more serious. The end result is that no 32 bit backup software (that use VSS, and most do) would run on x64 Vista machines.

We believed that this bug in Vista would be promptly fixed and a hot fix or service release issued and we’d be good to go. It turns out that this was not possible, so we were put into the position of having to re-engineer the Windows Home Server connector software as a native x64 application, and greatly expand our testing efforts. We did not have the resources to complete this by the time we RTM’d Windows Home Server.

The team has released an alpha version of the x64 connector code to Microsoft employees, and we would like to release it as part of the product with the first “minor” release (Code Name “UR1”) of Windows Home Server.

Q: As developers, what do you say to everyday consumers who feel that WHS is too expensive? Woody Leonhard, Phuket, Thailand

Todd: My experience is that anyone that fully grasps the capabilities and benefits of Windows Home Server will feel it is worth the price. It is always a challenge to explain and make the case for new product categories. That’s part of our marketing job.

Consumers are placing more and more importance on their digital content and “experiences.” Unfortunately many people struggle to keep that content safe, backed up, organized and better able to share and enjoy it. We think the value that Windows Home Server delivers in resolving those challenges is significant.

And don’t forget…you won’t waste any investment you’ve made in external drives with Home Server! Consumers can add their existing USB hard drives to their home servers as additional storage.

Q: With WHS not being made available on MSDN, do Microsoft want serious developers to support the platform or only hobbyists (i.e. Code2Fame)? Martin

Todd:Both. We’re working with a range of independent software vendors to develop Windows Home Server solutions, such as Diskeeper, Embedded Automation, F-Secure, HP, Iron Mountain, Lagotek, PacketVideo, Riptopia and SageTV, and others. Software partners that are interested in developing Windows Home Server Add-ins can contact the Windows Home Server partner team at WHSISV@microsoft.com

Q: Question to Charlie K: How was the beer in Germany? Christoph Dommermuth, Kiel, Germany

Charlie: Plentiful.

Q: Could you give us an insight into the tradeoffs and focus of the drive redundancy system? I’d like to understand the thinking behind allowing full duplication of content, but not of the system volume or backups. Fieldhouse

Todd: The key tradeoffs are product features and time to market. If you look at the original list of scenarios for a home server solution, they included server data backup, server system partition backup, backup to internet-based storage, etc. In the end, we focused on the most common (likely to occur) scenario and developed the concept of shared folder duplication to help protect a consumer’s important files, photos by enabling the content to be stored on 2 different hard drives, thus protecting the user from the failure of a single hard drive. The Server Reinstallation component will reinstall the Windows Home Server operating system, thus helping to protect a user from a corrupt operating system partition or the failure of the 1st hard drive – in this case a user would want to have all of their shared folders duplicated, to help ensure that they would not lose any files, photos, etc.

Now that first version of the product is out the door, the team is looking at some of the things that didn’t meet the “time to market” deadline and working on the next set of scenarios and features.

Q: Now that we’re at general availability, how do you think Windows Home Server and the work you’ve completed is perceived within other teams at Microsoft?

Todd:We’ve always had a lot of fans and supporters inside the company. We had 1,000+ employee “dogfooders” (who kept a secret well) before our public beta began and we’ve been working with a number of other product teams from the beginning. Early support from Bill Gates and other executives has helped create buzz and excitement inside the company, too. That being said, CES was an unveiling to many Microsoft employees, as well as the public. Since then, we’ve had a groundswell of enthusiasm (and interest in joining the team) from MS’ers around the globe. I think a lot of people around the company feel Windows Home Server strengthens Microsoft’s role in the digital home and consumer markets. We already have a lot of good integration with other Microsoft products and technologies with version 1, and that will only increase as we move forward.

Q: Looking back over the past year, with the beta program, CTP and RC releases it’s clear that a very deliberate attempt was made for a strong engagement with the enthusiast community, with the forums providing a very public stage for bugs and issues. This is a very different strategy from other Microsoft beta programs (compared to Media Center for example) – when was this decision taken and for what reasons? What have you learned from it?

Todd: Yes, this was a deliberate decision and a team philosophy from early on. A lot of people thought we were crazy to have an “invite-only beta” and a public community forum. We are a little crazy and we proved it can work, and I think you’ll find this approach being adopted by other groups across the company. We have been very committed to transparency because we knew that it would mean a better product as a result. The more testers, the higher quality product. And admittedly, we knew it would help us spread the gospel about this new product and would likely help us win some early customers who would evangelize for us. The Connect technology helped us execute our transparency strategy, too. What we’ve learned is that it was the right approach. Early adopters want to partner with Microsoft and will reward us for it with great input and really credible buzz.

This is easier to do with a V1 product than a product that is in market. As if you start talking about the “new cool version that is coming” too soon, then you may stall the sales of the in-market product.

Q: Has running the beta so transparently caused you any issues? If so, what were they and how were they resolved?

Todd: In general, it has meant we’ve had a LOT more data to work with. That’s good, of course, but increases the workload and makes the decision matrix of how and when to address issues more complicated. We’ve also had a few instances where public disclosure of bug counts or issues have made their way to the traditional media, who created some PR issues by sensationalizing or misrepresenting the information somewhat. Also, it is hard to give people’s individual suggestions or bugs direct feedback, as we spent more time trying to fix issues than communicate the status of all of the bugs. This alienated a few people, but due to the sheer volume of bugs and suggestions it was impossible for the team to provide details on each bug or suggestion.

Q: Will WHS v1 beta testers be invited to the future release of WHS (be it updates, patches or v2)? Tony Sutton, Norfolk, UK

Todd: Absolutely! While we don’t run beta programs for updates, we’ll certainly be looking for the participation of the community in betas for future versions of the software. We will probably do a staggered release, similar to what we did with the first version of Windows Home Server, where Microsoft employees will get access to the code in the alpha stages and then we will invite more and more people as we get more stability in the product and we get closer to when the product will be completed.

Q: Thinking ahead to your next release, whilst we’re too early to talk about planned features, could you give us a top-line overview on the plan for the next few months – user insight work, feature planning, early development etc. What will you be getting up to over the next 12 months or so?

Todd:The Windows Home Server team works on a “major” / “minor” / “major” rhythm when it comes to thinking about new features and release vehicles. We also use the monthly Windows Updates process to deliver new functionality or fixes to problems reported to our customer support services team. We issued our first monthly Windows Update for Windows Home Server in September, 2007 and are planning another one for November of this year. We are also working on a “minor” release which is Code Named “UR1” which stands for “Update Rollup 1” or “Update Release 1” depending who you talk to on the team. The timing and announcement of the features and availability of “UR1” is not finalized at this time. However, the external name for the “UR1” release is finalized, but can’t be shared externally just yet.

We are also starting to narrow the scope for the next “major” release of Windows Home Server as the planning process has started. It is way too early in the game to even postulate what will and won’t make the cut for that release at this time. But we have scoured the Community forums, and read every suggestion submitted through the Connect site. We have had a few day long meetings to brainstorm and strategize and are excited about the possibilities.

Q: Going forward, how will you decide what should be core functionality in WHS vs what should be left to add-in developers to provide? Allan Marsh, Wellington, New Zealand

Todd: The features and functionality of the product are driven by customer and community feedback. Our goal is to keep the product easy-to-use while delivering new capabilities that the majority of customers are interested in seeing in the next version of the product. The ability for the Windows Home Server community to submit suggestions, and vote/rank other people’s suggestions via http://connect.microsoft.com/WindowsHomeServer is a great help to the team.

Microsoft will continue to innovate on the core features of Windows Home Server including home computer backup and restore, centralized storage, remote access and media streaming. We see lots of opportunities for developers to enhance the existing version of Windows Home Server and also future versions.

Q: Do you think that some of the new innovations you’ve developed in WHS will find their way into other Windows releases in the future? (e.g. Drive Extender)

Todd: Perhaps. Some technologies are easy to implement / integrate than others. And as previously stated, Windows Home Server is developed by the Windows Server Solutions Group, and in that regard we are a product designed explicitly to meet the needs of a specific customer segment. The Drive Extender technology was developed and jointly integrated by a team in Microsoft’s Advanced Technology Lab and the Windows Home Server storage team. It took a lot of work, but due to the predictive nature of the Windows Home Server solution, some design decisions were simpler since we were incorporating the Drive Extender technology into a “headless” home server solution.

Q: When do you plan on supporting 64 bit Windows XP and Windows Vista PCs? Tony Ford, Phoenix AZ, USA

Todd: The Windows Home Server team is currently coding and testing an x64 Connector for Windows Vista PCs. We do not plan on supporting the Windows XP x64 operating system due to the tiny installed base and also the availability of Windows Vista x64.

Q: What scope is there for any future WHS support for Macs? I’m particularly thinking about OS 10.5’s Time Machine feature as this would be great if it could integrate with WHS. Prakhar Bahuguna, Manchester, UK

Todd: As you know, Mac users can of course use Windows Home Server as an on-premise file server and remotely access their shared folders of documents, music, etc. through the Windows Home Server remote access capabilities.

In Apple’s promotional materials, the state that Time Machine works with “external hard drives” and servers. The reality is that these external disks need to be formatted in Apple’s HFS Extended format and also the entire volume must be devoted to Time Machine.

We are investigating the possibilities of extending the Home Computer Backup & Restore technologies of Windows Home Server to other operating systems. Architecturally it seems possible, but the nitty gritty details may expose some insurmountable (too much code, too many testers needed, and too much time required) issue(s) that may make it economically hard to justify.

Q: Do you think that one day, Media Center and Windows Home Server will be more tightly integrated into one product? Peter Leibling, Cologne, Germany

Todd: That’s an interesting concept and certainly one we’ve been asked about more than a few times. Time will tell – and please don’t infer that “time will tell” means yes. There are a tremendous number of complex issues that need to be resolved to make this simple question become a reality.

Q: Will there be a ‘network’ Recycle Bin in the future, using shadow copies is too complicated for regular users! Danee

Todd: It’s too early to know an answer to this question.

Q: In the future, will you seek to include a lightweight Exchange server in Windows Home Server? Peter Leibling, Cologne, Germany

Todd: There are no plans to include any e-mail server functionality in Windows Home Server. Windows Small Business Server Standard editions includes Microsoft Exchange Server. If consumers want to run their own e-mail server in their homes, then they can use Windows Small Business Server.

Adding e-mail server functionality yields a significantly more difficult product to setup and manage. As with e-mail, comes SPAM and managing policies for protecting your server and the e-mail inboxes. Additionally, our research has proven that most consumers are very happy with their hosted e-mail services (e.g. Windows Live HotMail) and do not want their own e-mail server.

Q: Are there plans to integrate a security product into WHS, such as Windows Live OneCare? Hermann Haun, Germany

Todd: There are a variety of 3rd party software product vendors looking at adapting their solutions to work with Windows Home Server. We are working through the possibilities around OneCare integration.

Q: What’s it going to take for you folks to hire me as an SDE to help build v2? Brendan, Madison SD, USA

Todd: So you not only want to help build a great product, but you also want to have access to the daily builds and be able to test out all of this new cool stuff before anyone else?

Have you submitted your resume?

So that completes the Q&A with the Windows Home Server team. I’d like to say a big thank you to everyone who took time to submit their questions, and of course, to thank Todd, Joel and Charlie for their time in answering them!