When Bill Gates announced Windows Home Server (WHS) at the Las Vegas CES show in January 2007, it immediately caught our imagination.

The prospect of an easy-to-use home version of the industrial-strength Windows Server 2003 technology looked almost too good to be true.

Originally, it was unclear whether Microsoft would make the software available for home users to install on their own hardware. But the fact that the software finally made it into Release Candidate 1 (RC1) status in mid-June, for anyone to download and try out, strongly suggests that it will also be available as a shrinkwrapped product.

Of course there will be retail hardware – HP and Medion are just two companies that have pre-announced products – and we expect these to start appearing soon.

But whatever the case, we feel WHS could be one of the must-have home networking technologies for 2007, so we jumped at the chance to investigate this late-stage version and see how it looks. We used Virtual Server 2005 R2 to get a feel for WHS, and it worked flawlessly, although this isn’t a supported way of running it.

Bear in mind that we’re describing a pre-release beta product and the usual caveats apply – features could be added or disabled and WHS could include cosmetic changes by the time it hits the shelves. That said, we found it to be a pretty polished product overall. If you’d like to follow the comments and discussions between the army of beta testers, Microsoft has opened up the WHS forum to the public, and there’s a dedicated WHS homepage.

What does it do?
WHS is a home server operating system that’s designed primarily to simplify the process of maintaining regular backups of all your networked PCs and to enable easy sharing of your media files.

At its core is some innovative storage management and backup technology, wrapped in a plug-in-and-go package suitable for use by non-technical users. It’s designed to act as a ‘black box’ that sits in an unobtrusive location and automatically manages the whole process of data backup. It also allows centralised folder and printer sharing.

It’s definitely not designed to be used as a desktop PC – the idea is that you manage it entirely through a remote browser-based interface. Prebuilt WHS machines don’t even need keyboard, mouse or monitor connectors – just a wired Ethernet port plus USB or Firewire ports for adding external hard disks.

Wireless connections to a WHS box aren’t supported – this is a dedicated storage machine that needs all the network bandwidth it can get. You configure and manage it via a WHS console that’s part of special ‘client connector’ software that runs on each of your home PCs. The interface for this console has changed quite radically from some earlier prototype versions.

Remote web access to files and the management console via a dedicated built-in web server is also possible.