Announcing the RC of the SBS 2011 Essentials Windows Phone 7 Connector

[Today’s post comes to us courtesy of Michael Leworthy from Windows Server Marketing]

Today I am pleased to announce the Release Candidate of the Windows Server Solutions Phone Connector for Small Business Server 2011 Essentials (aka Integrating Windows Phone 7 with your SBS 2011 Essentials Server)

 

The purpose of this Add-in is to enable Remote Server Management tasks for SBS 2011 Essentials including

Alerts

After you complete the authentication steps with the server that you are trying to connect to, an alerts listing is the first panorama item that the application launches into. This feature brings the Alert Viewer that you know from the server, to the phone.

If an alert is displayed white, it is active and included in the alert count. If an alert is dimmed, that means the alert is disabled, and it is not included in the alert count. Any alert item can be clicked to view the full alert text just as on a computer. Contextual menu options include enabling or disabling an alert, and performing a repair action if one was assigned to this alert.

Users

The user-panorama item performs basic user management tasks, including:

  • Viewing user account details
  • Enable or disable a user account
  • Change a user account password

If you disable a user account, that is a reversible action. The moment a user account gets disabled, it causes the same effect as it would if you disable it by using the dashboard. The user’s access to Remote Web Access, the phone application, and any server resources is turned off.

Devices

“Devices” is a panorama item that lets you:

  • View server-joined computer and Mac details.
  • View the backup status that every device last reported to the server.
  • Start or stop a backup for any computer or the server (from the contextual menu).

 Live Tile Support

If you pin the application to the home screen of your Windows Phone 7, you will be able to see a variety of at-a-glance information without launching into the application. An opt-in using the settings menu is required.

The at-a-glance information includes:

  • Count and type of network health alerts.
  • Percentage of storage use of your main disk.
  • Server name sending this information. 

The Windows Phone 7 application requires both a server sided add-in to be installed on the SBS 2011 Essentials Server, as well as Windows 7 Phone application downloadable via marketplace. 

For further information, and access to the downloads to start testing today please visit the https://connect.microsoft.com/sbs site.  Please note this is a release candidate and as such is for testing purposes only.