Mommy, why is there a home server in the office?
By Simon Bisson & Mary Branscombe in Editorial
Posted in Hardware, Business, Networking, Server, HP, Microsoft on
Just because it’s the Consumer Electronics Show doesn’t mean there aren’t a lot of products that matter for business here in Vegas.
Connecting to multiple monitors wirelessly is as useful at work as it is at home; manufacturers like IOGEAR and Samsung are doing that with DisplayLink’s chips and a future product will put the screen from your mobile phone onto a TV or monitor. A SlingCatcher lets you send video from one TV to another (so you don’t have to pay a second Sky subscription to watch the occasional show on a TV in the bedroom), but you can also use it to see photos, presentations, Web pages - and anything else that’s on your PC screen - on TV, which is handy for an informal meeting. Panasonic’s 150″ screen is sized for a large meeting room rather than the average living room.
And then there’s Windows Home Server. It’s designed for the home - obviously. Microsoft has come up with an amusing ad campaign about Stay At Home Servers, complete with fake TV debates and a hugely funny children’s picture book entitled Mommy, Why Is There A Server In The House?
This derailed our press briefing for several minutes while we giggled our way through the book. You c an read the whole thing at http://www.stayathomeserver.com/book.aspx but to give you a flavour, here’s what you find in an office.
When we saw this page, we turned to each other and Mary said ‘but you gave me an Exchange server!”.
And while we don’t have a puppy, I’ve lost two laptops to red wine and a watering can so far…
But just as around a third of the copies of Small Business Server are sold to home users who need a mail server and file store at home, plenty of Windows Home Server boxes are going into offices. The spring PowerPack update will add some features that will be useful in business including finer-grain user control, so you can share files without the tab that lets visitors explore your PC. Microsoft’s Joel Sider thinks Windows Home Server is ideal as “executive backup for the CEO or the CFO who has all the financials on his PC”. If you can’t get executives to plug in at a certain time to do backups, or you find they interrupt backups to speed up something they’re doing, the invisible backup of any PC you connect to Windows Home Server could come in useful. Chris Grey of the Home Server team calls losing the only copy of the digital photos of your wedding “a divorceable event”; losing the only copy of the accounts the CFO just finished working on doesn’t have to be your fault to be a sackable event.
Rated: 100% (1 votes)
Loading ...Make a comment
Tag cloud
Archives
- November 2008
- October 2008
- September 2008
- August 2008
- July 2008
- June 2008
- May 2008
- April 2008
- March 2008
- February 2008
- January 2008
- December 2007
- November 2007
- October 2007
- September 2007
- August 2007
- July 2007
- June 2007
- May 2007
- April 2007
- March 2007
- February 2007
- January 2007
- December 2006
- November 2006
- October 2006
- September 2006
Most commented posts
- Java’s SSVAGENT.EXE: training the monkey
5 comments
- Wubi Tuesday
- Not very open, not very social
- The best mobile game ever
- A Big Day In The Enterprise IT World
- Employees are our most valuable asset (snigger)
- Biometrics - it's not the technology that's broken
- More battery life, fewer explosions
- Spam Fighting in Exchange
- IDF: Will SSD mean the end of 5GB free?
Highest Rated Blog Posts
- Nobody knows what Web 2.0 really is (100%)
- Songs of distant satellites (100%)
- Log in and lock in (100%)
- Mommy, why is there a home server in the office? (100%)
- Employees are our most valuable asset (snigger) (100%)
- Locking down IT or blocking creativity (100%)
- Video opera? What would you do with huge bandwidth and millions of pixels? (100%)
- Consumer BlackBerrys are good for business (100%)
- HD Trek (100%)
- Top tips for speeding up Vista (100%)