Microsoft's next-generation operating system Longhorn is
losing one of its most promising features: the WinFS file storage
system.
The company first showed WinFS as part of an uncharacteristically
early operating system preview a year ago at the Microsoft
Professional Developer's Conference. It was to be a hugely
important technology for the company, offering client-side users a
unified data storage and search mechanism.
For example, instead of having to search within multiple
applications such as e-mail, calendar, sales booking system, file
and photograph folders for data about a particular contact, you
could search in one place and retrieve all that data, linked to key
events and dates.
You could easily find not only who you met at an event last summer,
but also what photographs you took and what files you sent to whom
afterwards. The system was based around an XML schema which held
metadata about files, making it extensible to include custom data
types.
At least, that was the plan until 27 August. Then, Microsoft pulled
WinFS out of Longhorn and announced it would release the first beta
of the storage system at the same time as Longhorn proper. The full
release is likely to ship at the same time as Longhorn Server in
2007, said Microsoft staff.
"The ambition of rewriting the storage system has always been the
holy grail," said Neil Macehiter, research director at analyst firm
Ovum. "Reaching it is going to tax Microsoft. It would tax anyone,
doing it at the scale that Bill Gates envisages."
One area affected by the removal of WinFS is likely to be the
Microsoft Business Framework, which is a software layer designed to
sit on top of .net, providing base-level functions for business
applications.
"There was a strong dependency between the Business Framework and
WinFS," Macehiter said. "If people have relied on WinFS, does this
mean they are now back to the drawing board? Potentially it
does."
On the other hand, it could be a bonus for the Business Framework
in the long run. Mike Davis, senior research analyst at Butler
Group, said one of the problems with WinFS was that it did not
offer enough benefit when it was a client-only product. He said,
"It is a gimmick. It really only gives corporate value when you can
link it back to the server end."
Bill Gates and group vice-president for platforms Jim Allchin have
said that part of the reason for the delay was because they wanted
a server element.
"People said that if you do just the client, some of the scenarios
will not work as well. We would really like the new synchronisation
capabilities to go to the server as well, so we want client/server
capabilities," said Allchin. He added that they also want access to
tabular data.
Previously, synchronisation in WinFS simply meant synchronising
data between clients on the Lan and other devices such as personal
digital assistants. Moving it into the server arena gives it more
power.
Similarly, providing tabular data access at the server would enable
relational queries to be routed to server software through the
WinFS APIs, making it easier for applications to talk to server
applications through WinFS - doubtless something that the Business
Framework developers would die for and certainly something that
groupware suppliers such as IBM (Lotus) and Novell would be happy
to use.
"I am sure IBM and other collaborative groupware suppliers are in
conference negotiations with Microsoft over this," said Bill North,
research director at IDC.
He said it is difficult enough maintaining compatibility with your
own back-end applications without managing the complexity of a
not-yet-completed file storage system with broad system
implications.
As Microsoft tries to address these issues by making WinFS more
server-friendly, it faces the challenge of making it easy to scale
up. WinFS is not SQL Server, but Microsoft has based the system on
some of the same underlying technologies as the database (as
indicated by the reshuffling last year of Microsoft's top database
engineer Peter Spiro to manage the WinFS team).
It gives the company a fighting chance, said Macehiter who, like
Mark Quirk .net group technical manager at Microsoft, said
customers are unlikely to need a standalone copy of SQL Server to
use WinFS to access server data from the desktop.
"Some of the design is common, and they certainly share some of the
same knowledge and expertise. I do not see that because you happen
to be running it on the server you would need SQL Server on the
server when you do not need it on the client."
Quirke underscored Microsoft's strategy to base all of its storage
requirements on a single core engine using SQL Server, but
emphasised that underlying elements of the SQL Server code can be
used without trying to sell customers the full, packaged product.
Eventually, we will see products including Active Directory
(currently based on Jet) and WinFS all using the same underlying
engine from the SQL Server group. The transition of Exchange from
the Jet database it currently uses to an SQL Server-based engine
has also been on the cards for years.
As Microsoft thrashes out these file storage issues, Macehiter is
telling his clients to hold off. "My advice is not to bank on
WinFS, period," he said, predicting a three and a half to four-year
wait before the technology is production-ready.
"Microsoft said there will be a beta, but I will not be banking on
that now and basing my design decisions on a version of WinFS any
time soon," he said.
Microsoft will be more hopeful about WinFS because it represents an
ongoing attempt to move out of the application ghetto in which it
and its customers have languished for the past 30 years.
Making data document-centric has been a goal for almost half that
time, and Microsoft's failure to do it the first time around - with
the Object File System in the mid-1990s - is a testament to the
magnitude of the project.