What is the the purpose of WHS? Supposedly to centralise the most important things home users need simply, but what is the number one thing that every computer user uses? Email of course! More so than sharing music or pictures, people want their own email address to keep, and not have to keep changing when they change their ISP, and they want real email in their Outlook that they can remotely access via Outlook Web Access, and synchronise their calendars, tasks, contacts, sent items with their PDAs, desktop, laptop, etc. But still WHS does not offer an Exchange ability.

The official quote from Microsoft is Exchange adds too much complexity for a Home setup. DUH! Active Directory, NTFS Security, Server R2, Group Policies, IIS6 are all extremely complex tasks, but Microsoft removed all the complex stuff and made a simple Users and Security setup with simple file sharing security and even included a simple web server. Using that same methodology, how simple would it be to develop a simple-exchange?

All you need is for it to ask for "email domain" (@mydomain.com) and have a tab on the users accounts for "email addresses" and it shows __________@mydomain.com and you just enter whatever email address you want and WHS can simply look after the recipient policies etc, then Outlook 2007 should auto-find the mail account (else WHS gives simple instructions, no more complex than the existing instructions for setting up a home web server to share photos with granny!!) and from remote workspace you can connect to webmail.

It seems so simple and in such high demand that the vast majority of people who would make use of WHS are being forced instead to go with SBS and losing all the simplicity that WHS offered and the features of sharing media with XBOX simply, etc is not there.