Over the weekend, We Got Served and Home Server Blog will be publishing the list of finalists in the Windows Home Server Add-In Idea Competition ‘09. As you’ll remember, the WHS community was invited to submit their ideas for cool add-ins last month, with a set of great prizes up for grabs.
We had well over 300 entries to work through – first and foremost I’d like to thank and congratulate everyone who submitted an idea. It was very hard for us to judge so many fantastic ideas!
As you know, the first prize in the competition (along with a bunch of swag) is to have your idea coded up and turned into a real add-in, so we had to judge all of the entries on a combination of innovation and feasibility. The last thing we’d want is to not be able to create the winning add-in due to it needing a team of 45 developers to create! There were a few ideas which multiple entrants submitted (great minds thinking alike) – we also specifically judged the quality and detail of each idea submission to help differentiate between these entries.
We’ll announce the 10 finalists tomorrow, and public voting on those finalists will begin on Monday 15th June until the end of the month, so make sure you keep an eye on WGS right over the weekend.
Before we get to the finalists, however, our first order of business is to announce the runners-up! We had a great set of prizes donated by our competition supporters – enough to share around the Top 30 ideas. So, the following add-in entrants are awarded runner-up status and win a copy of a leading Windows Home Server software package.
| Position | Add-in Name | Entrant | Brief Description |
| 11 | Google Analytics for Windows Home Server | David McCabe | Track your inbound Internet connections to your home server’s web server with Google Analytics. |
| 12 | WHS Sync | Rene Leuteritz | Synchronise your shared folders between your home server and laptop, photo frame, cell phone, USB Stick or 2 home servers. |
| 13 | Home Document Manager | Joshua Benner | The Family Document Management add-in allows the user to store and retrieve, categorize, tag, and otherwise store metadata about various files such as receipts, warranty documents, legal documents, and so on. |
| 14 | Download Manager Central | Nigel Dixon | The Download Manger Central add-in will allow users to download files from any of the popular streams (http, torrent, ed2k, etc.) to their centralized, always on device. |
| 15 | Pictures In the Cloud | Colin McGraw | Have photos you want to share on Facebook, Flickr, Photobucket or similar sites? This add-in makes uploading as easy as copying the pictures you took to your “Cloud Images” folder! |
| 16 | Content Fetcher | Tobias Lindener | Files on your home computer will be automatically sorted and saved in the appropriate shared folder based on their file extension. |
| 17 | iTunes Remote Add-In | Florian Breitenberger | Control iTunes on any computer in the house via the Windows Home Server Console, or even a web interface. |
| 18 | Folding@home for WHS | Name Witheld | A Folding@home client for Windows Home Server with the ability to deploy and manage additional clients on your home computers. |
| 19 | Home Library Reader | Bill Moher | The Home Library Reader Add-In fills the void left by Microsoft in one critical digital media type: e-books and documents. It will both (1) manage a collection of PDF e-books and (2) provide a web-based viewer for books so that people can access their libraries of e-book form anywhere and not even have to download the file. |
| 20 | TagIt | Eddy Weber | Add tags, artwork and metadata to your music and video files. |
| 21 | WHS Hardware Monitor | Peter Schmalzl | Hardware monitor for your home server reporting HDD Temperature, HDD Health Status, motherboard and processor temperature, fan speeds, total operating time of the WHS, operating time since reboot, etc. Also outputs to an optional LCD Display. |
| 22 | Networked Remote Access | Jason Long | Instead of requiring remote access and the somewhat slow remote desktop approach to access your files, create a mapped drive to the PC so you can browse through the file folders through the same interface as you use to browse your WHS. This would include a wizard to make setup easy. |
| 23 | Workstation Wake-On-Lan | Mark Woodstock | Remote turn-on/switch off of all workstations connected to WHS |
| 24 | WHS Backup Configurator | Phil Bevan | The main feature this add-in would have is the ability to set an amount of time that backups will not occur for after a computer has booted. |
| 25 | Post-Download Manager | Jean-Martin A | The add-in scans a specific download folder and can do a specific task depending on the file type (archive, cd image, video). |
| 26 | WHS Event Trigger | Rob Cassie | Event monitor for connected machines, triggering a custom response on a predefined event. |
| 27 | mobile Konsole | Johannes Burkard | Publish the WHS Console as a web page for remote access. |
| 28 | Media Labeler | Tom Hamlyn | This add-in lets you fill in metadata information for your media (audio and video) manually or automatically with data from online resources. |
| 29 | Add In Search | David J Dean | This will collect RSS feeds of all the WHS blogs/websites, and listen out for any new add ins being published. You will then have the choice of installing them! |
| 30 | WHSQuota | Dan Adams | WHSQuota is an add-in that would allow the owner of the WHS to assign a quota to each user user on how much they can upload/download on a daily/weekly/monthly basis. |
Congratulations to our runners-up for their ingenuity – all great ideas that we’d certainly love to see developed as add-ins in the future. We’ll be in touch shortly with details of your prizes.
In the meantime, check back tomorrow to hear which ideas made the Top 10 and how you could win a great Windows Home Server prize pack just for voting!
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13. June 2009 at 8:51 pm
Ley me be the first one to congratulate every one of you guys so far.
I can't wait to see the rest of the list. If these are only the 30+ submissions, I wonder just how impressive the 10+ will be…
Good luck!
__Miguel_
13. June 2009 at 9:24 pm
For an alternative to item 17 (iTunes Remote) can I suggest looking at PlayerPal.com it is very close to what you are looking for.
14. June 2009 at 1:03 am
I sorta got stumped at how much detail they wanted for the entry, congrats to everyone who entered.
13. June 2009 at 9:11 pm
There are some really great ideas in here, but they also look like they might be hard to implement.
14. June 2009 at 10:12 am
That's the balance I was alluding to in the post – there have been some wonderfully innovative ideas which would be simply too tough for a single add-in developer to achieve.
14. June 2009 at 6:42 am
Woohoo, I was a runner up. Some great ideas in there.
14. June 2009 at 10:11 am
Well done!
15. June 2009 at 8:58 am
Wow, I made it in there (14). TBH I kinda didn't expect to win, as my idea would probably have taken a a significant time to put together and probably require a full team.
Maybe I'll start working on it myself.
15. June 2009 at 9:31 am
Prize heading your way!
15. June 2009 at 9:53 am
Prize recieved – Managed to snag a license for My Movies – pretty cool, I've been meening to give this a look for quite a while.
15. June 2009 at 10:05 am
Enjoy it – it rocks! Make sure you check out the Media Center client too….