“However, before switching your small network to HomeGroup,
there are several possible “gotchas” to keep in mind.
First, generally speaking HomeGroup is a Windows 7 only technology.
Without manually setting up a Windows 7 system as a mini-server in
its own right, non-Windows 7 systems will be unable to access a
HomeGroup PC’s resources.“While you can set up a HomeGroup PC to share its resources with
Windows XP, Windows Vista, Mac OS X, and even Linux systems,
it’s not easy to do. If you need to go to that much trouble
to share resources, you’re better off using real servers,
such as Windows 2003, Windows Server 2008 or Linux running
Samba.“You should also keep in mind that while you can join a
HomeGroup with any edition of Windows 7, you can only create one in
Home Premium, Professional, Ultimate, or Enterprise. So, in short,
you can’t use it as drop-in replacement for an existing
Windows XP peer-to-peer Workgroup network in which every PC shares
all its resources with the others.”This should help admins who have to make Windows play nice
on their networks–ed.
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