Do you miss some of the information you used to see in WHS V1? Well Jerry Wade has written an app that brings that information to WHS 2011.
This is how Jerry describes this app:
It wasn’t long ago I told my friend, John, about my wonderful WHSv1. He decided to create his own box and use WHS 2011. However, he noticed that the icon did not give him the same information as mine such as, connectivity and backup in progress (eg: blue icon). After pondering over this, I decided to put my limited programming skills to work and develop a home server status application. So, without further hesitation, world, humbly meet: Home Server Status v1.0.
REQUIREMENTS:
- .NET Framework 4
- WHS 2011 Connector
- Windows 7 32/64-bit machine. (Why only Windows 7? Well, it offered the features I wanted to see such as, the overlay icons and taskbar pinning.)
There is one minor issue when pinning Home Server Status to the taskbar: When you pin the icon to your taskbar, you will notice that the icon changes to the default. Just go back into settings and reselect the icon again or simply press close/update. This is not a problem with HSS, but with the way Microsoft creates their pinned icons and how I chose to handle them.
I enjoy this application and am happy with the performance. I like to have it pinned to the taskbar and at quick glance see that the server is online, offline, or backing up my client PC. The ability to get to the shared folder quickly is also a plus. To top it off for me is the ability to make an icon representation of my physical server and have HSSv1 us that as my pinned icon, and still have the overlay icons showing the status is awesome. Great job Mr. Wade, Thank you for your hard work.
Really? The connector in WHS 2011 doesn’t show blue/red/green/yellow? Wouldn’t that be major functionality to overlook?
Well for some people they didn’t care as long as it backed up – and you can see the information on the Dashboard, just not on the PC itself. So this app gives you that information back.
Love this app! I wish it would work on my Vista machines as well. I don’t know what Microsoft was thinking when it left these basic functions out of 2011. I am managing without drive extender so far, just using Raid, but letting the clients know when they are being backed up, and therefore don’t shut down in the middle of it, is very important to me!
Thank you for making this wonderful replacement!