OFFICE

Windows 7 Homegroup

Networking Made Easy

At long last, Windows has made home networks easy. Here’s what you need to know. By Neil Randall

Microsoft has been trying for a long while to make home networks easy to use, with automatic connection and ready access to shared files and folders. With the Windows 7 feature known as “HomeGroup,” it seems that the company has finally succeeded.

HomeGroup lets you create a home network with built-in and expandable sharing and access capabilities. It’s a neat new feature of Windows 7—and it works only with Windows 7, so Vista, XP, Mac, and Linux users can’t join in on the fun.

Windows 7 lets you establish three types of networks—Home, Work, and Public—and a homegroup can exist only if the networks on all your PCs are set to Home. To configure your Windows 7 PC’s network as Home, open the Control Panel and choose Network and Internet, then Network and Sharing Center (you can also access the Network and Sharing Center by right-clicking on the network icon in the system tray). Verify that under the Network icon you show “Home

cHoose netWoRk tYPe You must be part of a Home network to use a homegroup.

network.” If not, click the link—Public network or Work network—and choose Home Network instead.

From that point on, you can create a homegroup. After you set your network to Home, in fact, Windows 7 takes you directly to the Create a homegroup dialog box. If your network is already set to Home, click the link named Choose homegroup and sharing options, and in the subsequent dialog box click Create.

HoMeGRouP PRoPeRties

From the Change homegroup settings control panel, you can change the password and move to the Advanced Sharing dialog.

The next step is choosing which kinds of media you want to share with other members of the homegroup. The options are pictures, music, videos, documents, and (oddly enough) printers. These options correspond with the libraries Windows 7 creates by default when it’s installed on each PC, and in turn with the folders created by default in each user profile.

Essentially, what you’re doing by opting to share any of these items is giving other PCs in the homegroup access to the specified folders in your user profile. In my case, for example, that means C:\Users\Neil\Pictures, C:\Users\Neil\Music, and so forth. In addition, the homegroup gives users access to the C:\Users\Public folder on your drive. You can add other shareable locations to the homegroup later, as we’ll see.

Once you’ve finished this step, Windows 7 opens a screen containing a password for your homegroup; as we’ll also see, a second PC will require that password to join the homegroup. For now, be sure to store the password (you can simply highlight and copy it to a text file or an e-mail message, for example) or make a printout of the info, which includes a brief set of instructions for other users.

Click Finish and your homegroup is set up. The Change homegroup settings control panel gives you an opportunity to change the password you’ve established and access the Advanced Sharing Settings screen, but one important thing it does not allow you to do—at least from here—is add more libraries, folders, or files to the homegroup. This seems a rather strange omission, given that the point of homegroups is customizability of resource access.

At this point, even though it’s not really necessary, check out the Advanced Sharing Settings screen by clicking Change advanced sharing settings. On the subse-

quent two-item dialog, click the down arrow beside Home or Work.

Here you’ll find a long screen of six options, a useful guide to how Windows 7 home networks are configured (in fact, all Windows 7 networks use these basic simple configuration options). The most important points to note in the Advanced Sharing dialog are network discovery (allowing other PCs to find yours), file and printer sharing, and media sharing. Without these turned on, you lose much of the point of having a homegroup: the seamless sharing among computers in your house of files that are stored in a central location and on a single large hard drive to which files are constantly added.

Once you’ve established the homegroup, computers that see your network can join it. To do so, the user of each computer opens the Network and Sharing Center from Control Panel on that computer and clicks “Choose homegroup”—the resulting screen asks “Do you want to join a homegroup?” and displays those available. Click Join Now to become a member of that homegroup.

When your computer joins the homegroup, a link on the dialog box will take you to the Windows Help screen about accessing resources on the homegroup. This is good introductory material for any users unfamiliar with this kind of resource sharing, especially those unacquainted with making their own resources available.

By default, all the libraries created with the installation of Windows 7 are shared on the homegroup. You are not, however, restricted to these libraries when it comes to sharing. As you and other members add libraries, you can share each of them manually. Open the Libraries window from the taskbar and find the one you want to share. Right-click it and choose Share With | Homegroup. There are two such choices: Read and Read/Write. If you want other users to be able to access the folder without being able to add to it from their machines, choose Read; if you want the library to be fully functional for all users, choose Read/ Write.

You can share individual folders and even files on the homegroup as well, although putting folders inside libraries is by far the more efficient way to do this. n

libRARY sHARinG To change existing sharing of libraries, right-click the library and reselect your Share With option, choosing the option you want.