By Scott M. Fulton, III, Betanews
Beginning now, Betanews is going to get a lot more intimate with technology than you've seen us before, particularly with Microsoft Windows 7 now that it's becoming a reality. Next Tuesday, the first and probably only Release Candidate of the operating system will become available for free download.
It's probably not so much a testing exercise as a colossal promotional giveaway, a way to get Windows 7 out in the field very fast...and use that leverage to push Vista out of the way of history. So much of what you'll see in the Release Candidate in terms of underlying technology is finalized; any tweaks that will be done between now and the general release date (which PC manufacturer Acer blabbed last night will be October 23) will likely be in the looks department.
So with a reasonable degree of confidence that the Win7 RC is much more than half-baked, today Betanews begins a continuing series looking into what we believe to be the ten most important new features that Win7 brings to the table -- features that represent significant changes to the platform we've been calling Vista, and changes which appear very likely to be improvements. Maybe they should have been part of Vista to start with.
There's no reason that the experience of setting up networking equipment at home should be a subset of the pain and misery businesses sustain when they toil and sweat over Vista. Business networking has evolved into a very complicated context that cannot be made simpler or more palatable or livable through the use of any metaphor you can come up with. You can't make Active Directory simple enough for everyday home users to want to wrestle with it, or even for sophisticated network admins to want to deal with the same dredge when they get home.
In Microsoft laboratory projects that first came to light during the "Code Name Longhorn" project in 2003, engineers found themselves reasoning this way: There's only a few basic principles that home network users want to see implemented anyway. They want all their machines to share content with one another. They want any resource to be visible to the entire network (why would you want to hide a printer?). If they do mean to hide something from accessibility, users want the ability to do so explicitly, but only when it's necessary. They want portable components and devices to know they're on the network when they're in range or plugged in, and for the network to know when they're gone. And they want other people's equipment to stay off of their network.
So the trust situations between home network components should be fairly straightforward. Thus rather than forcing home users to wrestle with enterprise-quality network resources, but just have them wrestle with it the same way every day until they get accustomed to it, the engineers came up with an idea called "Castle," whose legacy is a mention in Microsoft's pre-release privacy statement for Longhorn testers. Without invoking any part of Active Directory (and making the Windows Client far more cumbersome than it needed to be), this system created a kind of default home network user template that applied in most situations, creates the trusts that most users would expect, and gives users easier ways to adjust those trusts when necessary.
Vista was so late to the game in getting anything even partly resembling Castle to market that only in Service Pack 2, which hasn't even been released to the public yet, will we see a feature called Windows Connect Now -- a facility that actually works just fine in Windows XP SP2 -- be implemented for the first time in Vista.
Finally, Windows 7 is giving this concept a try, with what's called the Homegroup (now with a lower-case "g," in keeping with the growing trend to remove unnecessary upper-case from product names). The basic concept boils down to this: If Win7 devices can identify themselves as being "at home" when they're on premises, then there's really no reason why their shared resources can't all be seen as unified. In other words, not "Scott's Pictures" and "Jennifer's Pictures" but "Pictures."
Enrolling a computer as a homegroup member is a simple process -- so simple that reviewers of the earlier Win7 betas, for good reason, were skeptical that the security would be as porous as Windows XP. To become a member of an existing homegroup, one need only know the password, the default for which was generated when the first Win7 computer created the homegroup. For now, only Windows 7 computers can be homegroup members, and that will likely always be the case seeing as how WCN functionality was only just now added to Vista SP2 (unless there is an SP3 to come).
Next: The promise of single media libraries...
The real payoff from homegroups comes in the form of libraries, which is Win7's new aggregate view for shared system folders. Under this system, like content from multiple locations can be made accessible from a single resource to all members of the homegroup. While it seemed to make sense at first to segregate content in a home network in accordance with how accounts are allocated, the way things ended up, keeping track of locations as well as categories ("Pictures of Dad belonging to Jake," "Pictures of Dad belonging to Dad," etc.) became too much of a headache...the kind with which Vista eventually became permanently associated.
Perhaps the true test of homegroups' and libraries' usefulness in Win7 will come with the new Windows Media Center for Home Premium and Ultimate users. Currently in Vista, WMC enables you to set up "watch folders" throughout a home network, presumably with the idea of being able to automatically enroll new content as it enters folders everywhere in WMC's purview. The problem is, not only is WMC watching those folders, but so are you, so you end up having to traverse the network directory tree to locate what you wand -- not unlike playing a game of Frogger blindfolded.
Under the homegroup system, libraries that aggregate content throughout a homegroup will be visible to the new WMC as a single source. You want videos, you go to "videos." And conceivably (this is something I'll have to see myself to believe), a PC running the new WMC will be able to stream content from any member of the homegroup, to any member of the homegroup, almost as though WMC were a passive server.
If you're a Media Center veteran, you may already be hearing the comfortable plinking sound of unspent coins being returned to your piggy bank. There has actually been a cottage industry in Media Center Extender devices being sold to individuals who, technically, didn't actually need them. The MCE is supposed to make networked devices accessible to WMC, and some devices like external hard drives do so legitimately. But many such devices -- especially the ones that promise to stream photos, music, and videos to any PC in the house -- are essentially stripped down Wi-Fi adapters, some of which are being purchased by folks who already have Wi-Fi adapters.
In a homegroup-endowed world, these particular customers would not need MCE devices; they'd use the routers they already own to let Windows do the job that it was supposed to do in the first place.
From the perspective of a Windows engineer, the biggest barrier the homegroup system may overcome is that of enrolling portable PCs as homegroup members while they're in the home, and yet enabling them to be domain members while they're in the workplace. Even with Vista, this was essentially impossible even though its newer TCP/IP stack included setup for alternate IP locations. I personally wrestled with this issue to no avail; at present, it's impossible for a business' laptop PC that uses a VPN to also be a member of a local Windows 3.11-style workgroup; it can be one or the other, but never both.
The promise of Windows 7 is that laptops may be transported to work, become "business PCs," and be enrolled with all their enterprise-level Active Directory privileges; then be taken home, become "home PCs," and be open to all the family's shared files, aggregate libraries, and other conveniences; and ne'er the twain shall meet. This will be an extremely tall order, which if fulfilled, will be fabulous: Corporations' policies for the use of company equipment, or even personally-owned laptops with access to company resources, only tightened during the Vista era.
If the computer truly is the network, as folks like Bill Gates have been saying for decades, then perhaps part of what had been plaguing Vista all this time is due to home users' perception of the task of networking. The homegroup system is a big gamble to address and solve this perception problem, and with all its promise, it can either succeed spectacularly or fail spectacularly. We'll probably be seeing some of the spectacle long before the final release date.
Copyright Betanews, Inc. 2009