Announced in January at the Consumer Electronics Show and expected to ship this summer, Microsoft Windows Home Server is currently in the beta stage. Developers have been inundated with bug reports for the consumer server software; according to program manager Chris Sullivan the group has received nearly 2,400 bug reports so far, about 495 (about 21%) are classified as "active" (still under investigation, pending a response or waiting to be investigated). Of the bugs that have been addressed, Sullivan said that only 15% have actually been fixed. The remainder are issues that are in the server by design (13%), not reproducible (21%), will be postponed to later versions (11%) or likely won"t be fixed (7%). Yeah, I realize that doesn"t add up to 100%, the rest were probably duplicates or something else.
Home Server won"t be sold separately; it will be only available via OEM purchases. Microsoft is expected to release the OS before the back-to-school selling season starts in July and August, with a release to manufacturing deadline set for late June. The software, based primarily on Windows Server 2003 code, will connect to systems running Windows Vista and Windows XP for file sharing, media playing and backup; and to Mac OS X and Linux machines for file sharing. Microsoft did not respond to a call asking for a status update on development, and whether the summer release schedule still holds.