Sharing Folders and Files on the Windows Home Server 2011 : Copying Files to a Shared Folder, Publishing a Windows Vista Calendar to the Server

1. Copying Files to a Shared Folder

Most of the Windows Home Server shares are empty after the initial installation. To make these shares useful, you need to copy (or move) files from a client machine to the server. It’s quite common to load up Windows Home Server with a huge number of media files—music, photos, videos, and so on—to give other people on the network access to those files to stream to an Xbox 360 or other network media device.

Before you initiate such a large copy operation, you need to check to see whether the destination folder is included in the Windows Home Server media library. If it is, Windows Home Server starts indexing the media while the file transfer is in progress which, again, only slows everything down. Temporarily remove the folder from the media library before starting the file transfer, and then add it back again afterward.

Follow these steps to copy or move files from a client machine to a Windows Home Server shared folder:

One of the pleasant surprises in Windows Vista was a new program called Windows Calendar. It’s not as powerful as Outlook’s Calendar feature, but it does all the basic jobs that a calendar should: You can create appointments (one-time and recurring), set up all-day events, schedule tasks, apply reminders to appointments and tasks, and view appointments by day, week, or month. For our purposes, Windows Calendar even does something that Outlook’s Calendar can’t: It can publish a calendar to a network share. (With Outlook, you need to be on a Microsoft Exchange network to do this.) You can set things up so that the published calendar is updated automatically, so the remote calendar always has current data. Your family members can then subscribe to the calendar to see your appointments (and, optionally, your notes, reminders, and tasks).

2. Publishing a Windows Vista Calendar to the Server

This means that you can create a new shared folder—called, say, Calendars—and publish your calendar to that folder. After you’ve done that, start Windows Calendar using any of the following methods:

• Select Start, All Programs, Windows Calendar.
  
  
• Press Windows Logo+R (or select Start, All Programs, Accessories, Run) to open the Run dialog box, type wincal, and click OK.
  
  
• In Windows Mail, select Tools, Windows Calendar, or press Ctrl+Shift+L.
  
  

Publishing Your Calendar

Here are the steps you need to follow in Windows Calendar to publish your calendar:

1.	In the Calendars list, click the calendar you want to publish.
2.	Select Share, Publish to open the Publish Calendar dialog box.
3.	Edit the calendar name, if necessary. Tip After the calendar publishes, you have the option of sending an email message that includes the address of the shared calendar. Most email clients display this address as a link. However, if the address includes spaces, the link stops at the first space. Therefore, consider changing the calendar name to remove any spaces.
4.	Use the Location to Publish Calendar text box to type the address of the shared folder you created on Windows Home Server (see Figure 1). Figure 1. Use the Publish Calendar dialog box to publish your calendar to a shared Windows Home Server folder.
5.	If you want Windows Calendar to update your calendar whenever you make changes to it, activate the Automatically Publish Changes Made to This Calendar check box. (If you leave this option deactivated, you can still publish your changes by hand, as described later; see “Working with Shared Calendars.”)
6.	In the Calendar Details to Include section, activate the check box beside each item you want in your published calendar: Notes, Reminders, and Tasks.
7.	Click Publish. Windows Calendar publishes the calendar to Windows Home Server by creating a file in the iCalendar format (.ics extension) and copying that file to the share. Windows Calendar then displays a dialog box to let you know the operation was successful.
8.	To let other people know that your calendar is shared and where it can be found, click Announce. Windows Calendar creates a new email message that includes the following in the body (where address is the address of your published calendar; see Figure 2 for an example): You can subscribe to my calendar at address Figure 2. You can send an email message to let everyone know that you’ve published your calendar on Windows Home Server.
9.	Click Finish.

Subscribing to a Calendar

You can add another person’s published calendar to your Calendars list. How you do this depends on whether you’ve received a subscription invitation via email.

If you have such a message, follow these steps:

If you don’t have a subscription invitation message, follow these steps instead:

Working with Shared Calendars

After you publish one or more of your calendars and subscribe to one or more remote calendars, Windows Calendar offers a number of techniques for working with these items. Here’s a summary:

• Changing a calendar’s sharing information— When you select a published or subscribed calendar, the Details pane displays a Sharing Information section, and you use the controls in that section to configure the calendar’s sharing options.

• Publishing calendar changes— If your published calendar isn’t configured to automatically publish changes, you can republish by hand by selecting the calendar and then selecting Share, Sync.

• Updating a subscribed calendar— If you didn’t configure an update interval for a subscribed calendar, or if you want to see the latest data in that calendar before the next update is scheduled, select the calendar and then select Share, Sync.

• Synchronizing all shared calendars— If you have multiple shared calendars (published and subscribed), you can synchronize them all at once by selecting Share, Sync All.

• Sending a published calendar announcement— If you didn’t send an announcement about your published calendar, or if you want to send the announcement to different people, select the calendar and then select Share, Send Publish E-Mail.

• Stopping a published calendar— If you no longer want other people to subscribe to your calendar, select it and then select Stop Publishing. When Calendar asks you to confirm, click Unpublish. (Note, however, that if you want your calendar file to remain on the server, you first need to deactivate the Delete Calendar on Server check box.)

• Stopping a subscribed calendar— If you no longer want to subscribe to a remote calendar, select it and then press Delete. When Calendar asks you to confirm, click Yes.