If you wish to participate in Windows Home Server evaluation program and/or to participate in the Code2Fame Challenge, you’ve come to the right place. Thank you for your interest in Windows Home Server. We are about to reach a new milestone, Release Candidate 1. When Windows Home Server RC 1 becomes available we will notify all applicants so they can download the software from the Microsoft Connect Site.

Windows Home Server Code2Fame Challenge

Killer Add-Ins = Fame and Fortune

Industry exposure and cold cash will be awarded to extraordinary coders that can create the best software and hardware add-ins for the soon-to-be-released Windows Home Server.

Challenge: Create cool software and/or hardware add-ins for Windows Home Server to simplify the digital lifestyles of families everywhere; or just to geek out. Over $50,000 in prizes!

To qualify, your add-in must use Windows Home Server RC 1, so register to receive it now! Other qualifications and information:
www.microsoft.com/windowshomeserver/challenge

Windows Home Server helps families with multiple PCs easily centralize, share and protect their digital pictures, music, documents and videos. As a development platform, Windows Home Server offers hardware and software developers tremendous opportunities to build innovative solutions.
We will contact all applicants for the RC with instructions about how to access the software. Please be patient.

Please fill out this survey to register for the release candidate:
Windows Home Server Participation Survey
Thanks,

Windows Home Server Team

Sign-up Link

This OS is going to satisfy a huge demand and also create a market for home servers. Running a server for the whole family to store their music, videos and other media and data has obvious appeal in my opinion and this is currently only available to techie users and those who are prepared to shell out for a server OS. I'm sure MS will price Windows Home Server so that it is accessible to most.

I look forward to seeing the changes made since the last beta

After reading (some of) the WHS public forum it sounds like the RC1 release is going to be pretty soon

Its not to late to sign-up for the download, if you haven't already & are interested in testing or playing with WHS

Grav!ty wrote:

This OS is going to satisfy a huge demand and also create a market for home servers. Running a server for the whole family to store their music, videos and other media and data has obvious appeal in my opinion and this is currently only available to techie users and those who are prepared to shell out for a server OS. I'm sure MS will price Windows Home Server so that it is accessible to most. I look forward to seeing the changes made since the last beta

I am still hoping that they will provide some kinda of profile storing (sort of like Active Directory, but much more simple) because people use more than one computer around the house and it would help to have all of your settings there when you log on to a different one than the main.

I think that WSUS compatibility would also be good.

I had the CTP installed for a little while on one of my test machines constantly got out of space messages. Set it up to delete the backups daily and still got low or out of space messages, and it didn't delete the backups as it was suppose to, so I hope the next release fixes that.

I just tested out WSUS tonight, because Windows Home Server is based off of the Server 2003 Small Business Edition, and WSUS 3.0 installed and ran just fine. A couple of things I had to work around:

1. Have to manually change all of the group policy settings of each computer (clients and server) to point to that Intranet website for updates.

2. Windows XP Home edition does not have group policy access through the MMC console so pointing the Windows Updates to be run from the server instead of the Windows server is available (as I know of yet).