Hi, I’m Mike Chen, program manager for the Windows Server Essentials team, and today I would like to share with you the extensibility story for Windows Server 2012 Essentials.
I’ll start with an overview of the extensibility points across Dashboard, Launchpad, Remote Web Access, and Health Monitoring. As you know, Windows Server 2012 Essentials is a hybrid solution that connects your on-premises environment to the cloud service. We will use cloud service integration scenarios when we talk about the extensibility points; these extensibility points can also be used by non-service-integration add-ins.
Let’s take a look at the Windows Azure Online Backup add-in (for more information, see the blog post Windows Azure Online Backup and Windows Server 2012 Essentials ).
In the preceding screenshot, add-ins can be used in the Dashboard in four places:
In addition to these four options, the Dashboard also allows you to extend the built-in list view, wizards, and property pages by adding your own logic to the existing experience. An existing implementation of this is the built-in email solutions (including Office 365 and on-premises Exchange) that extend the list view, add a user wizard and user property pages that leverage the framework. We’re going to discuss this in depth in the upcoming blog for Hosted Email Add-in Framework.
Client-side integration is also interesting when you write an add-in to integrate with online services.
Anywhere Access is important for home and business environments today. To keep users more productive, they need to access files and folders anytime from their devices. In order to support this, Windows Server 2012 Essentials exposes a set of built-in web services for third-party developers to build applications on different devices that can access files and manage the server remotely. The built-in web services include file access, file operations, media access, and management tasks (including alerts, users, storage, devices). For a complete list of web services, see our MSDN page .
The following sample code demonstrates how to call the web services to access a folder from Windows 8 by using HTML and JavaScript. In HTML, we create a list view on your page to display the data. You will need to define the template of the item that defines how it’s going to be displayed.
<div id="fileListView" data-win-control="WinJS.UI.ListView"/>
In JavaScript, we use an HTTP request with your credential to get the information about items in the Company folder.
var url = "https://[serverName]/services/builtin/fileoperationservice.svc/items/index/0/count/10?path=\\\\[machineName]\\Company&filter=All&sortByField=Name&ascending=True";
WinJS.xhr({
url: encodeURI(url),
user: "[userName]",
password: "[password]",
headers: {
"AppName": "[appName]",
"Accept": "application/json"
}
}).done(function (response) {
var obtainedData = window.JSON.parse(response.responseText);
var fileList = new WinJS.Binding.List(obtainedData.Items);
WinJS.UI.setOptions(fileListView.winControl, { itemDataSource: fileList.dataSource });
WinJS.UI.processAll();
});
To learn more about the Windows Sever 2012 Essentials SDK, you can visit our MSDN site and download the SDK . We’re looking forward to your feedback in our forum .
You must be a registered user to add a comment. If you've already registered, sign in. Otherwise, register and sign in.