Tom’s Hardware Guide provides an in-depth review of Windows Future Storage (WinFS). Including some points I wasn’t quite sure of myselft…

“Microsoft will not be building an entirely new file system after all. Windows Future Storage (WinFS) is integrated into Longhorn as a modular extension to file management.”

“Technologically, Longhorn is in any case not entrenched in WinFS. The OS works just as well on FAT32 volumes. Conversely, WinFS can be used in other systems, too…”

Good stuff!

Michael Sippey has a couple of good comments regarding Salesforce.com’s recently released “Office Edition,” which integrates its hosted SFA tightly with Microsoft Office:

“The company that championed went overboard with their “no software” positioning is now touting their integration into the world’s most widely used piece of personal productivity software. Which really isn’t that big of a deal, when you realize that this fits in perfectly with Microsoft’s strategy of morphing Office into a combination productivity app and very rich client…”

“If you’ve seen any of the whiz bang demos of Longhorn, it’s abundantly clear that the browser is not where it’s at for Microsoft. Instead, it’s all about the rich client. While .NET application development isn’t for everyone, there’s enough interesting functionality in the new Office to enable the return of the power user — the former macro writer who can now leverage their VB skills to integrate data (through web services inside and outside the firewall) into their everyday working environment.”

As much as I love the “thin client”, the browser can’t do everything. Business users still do a majority of their work in Word and Excel. I’m increasingly amazed and at times alarmed at the sheer amount of “business logic” that is maintained exclusively in Excel Worksheets.

Although, I may not agree that this practice is necessarily a good thing, the reality is that it’s not going to change quickly.

However, providing a more fluid means to transact “business logic” between productivity applications like Excel and Word with ERP, CRM and various enterprise systems seems like a natural progression.

Anil Dash put together a first-class summary of the *nix goodies found in Microsoft’s Windows Services for Unix, which was recently re-released as a free download (passport registration required).

Even though I’m using Samba at home to connect my Windows and Linux file systems, it might be nice (and more efficient) to use the native NFS support in WSfU instead.

I’m in training all week. So I’m a bit out of touch, but I just spotted this little Office “add-in” released by Microsoft that “can permanently remove hidden data and collaboration data, such as change tracking and comments, from Microsoft Word, Microsoft Excel, and Microsoft PowerPoint files.” (via Lockergnome)

Others have mentioned the impact of the embedded RSS capabilities that will be in Longhorn. This time however, it’s Scoble talking about the broader implications of a syndication friendly OS

“In Longhorn you can store a ton of metadata with your files. You can also find those files much more easily. Why is that important to syndication? Because now you have a file system that supports sending files out via a syndication feed, storing them locally, and then letting users get to them in new and interesting ways.”

Michael Kanellos from CNET exposes some of the research at Microsoft to make search a greater part of its Windows operating system. The following are some interesting quotes from the article:

“Search in many ways is brute force,” Dumais said. “If the two of us type in a query, we get the same thing back, and that is just brain dead. There is no way an intelligent human being would tell us the same thing about the same topic.”

“Personalization was one of the big buzzwords of the early years of the dot-com era, but many of the efforts to deliver individualized content failed. Software developers, however, are increasingly becoming more adept at using Bayesian models and other probabilistic techniques to insert intelligence into software.”

“Although the underlying calculation in these models is complex, the overriding concept is fairly simple. Software keeps tabs on an individual’s Web surfing habits, interests, acquaintances, work and travel history, work projects, and other data. It also constructs a model that tries to anticipate what a person finds important and what will be irrelevant.”

“Microsoft’s experiments differ from commercial search engines in that the universe of data searched consists of data found on an individual’s hard drive.”

“In demonstrating Implicit Query, Dumais began to type an e-mail asking a colleague about a set of slides for an upcoming conference. Before the message was complete, the program–which appears in a window on the side of the screen– pulled up e-mails, slide decks and Word documents containing the name of the conference and the future recipient. Each hit came with a brief summary of the internal content, date, the type of software the file was written in, and its potential relevance, among other information.”

This is fascinating stuff and I can’t wait to see it in action.

However, based on the article it seems to me that Microsoft’s new search is focused on an enterprise that is still Personal Computing-centric, which is ideal today, but Longhorn is still two years away and it will be at least another year before we see it implemented within larger enterprises.

My concern is how applicable will a better PC-centric search be if personal enterprise computing finally becomes network-centric?

Albeit, we’ve all seen the rise and fall of the “Network Computer”, but I still believe in the underlying concepts that will end our intrinsic relationship with our dedicate hardware. Indeed, I’m talking about an environment where we will finally be able to productively “work” from any network-connected device.

Essentially, if in the coming years before Longhorn, a network-centric IT enterprise landscape becomes more widespread then the benefits of providing a better index to ones hard drive will be diminished.

Perhaps I’m being too close-minded and not including the bigger picture — especially with regard to Longhorn’s Indigo. I expect it’s more likely that Network and Personal computing will merge within the confines of a Service Oriented Architecture (SOA); whereby applications and computing power will come to the user where and when they need it. Of course this must include access to “Stuff I’ve Seen”.

This essentially describes the holy-grail of Network Computing or rather a “Personal service-oriented architecture” as Jon Udell describes.

Mary Jo Foley of Microsoft Watch interviews Microsoft social computing group researcher Lili Cheng, which reveals some more insight (including screen shots) into MSFT’s social-networking software code-named “Wallop“:

“We’ve been really interested in blogs, wikis, authoring and syndication around RSS, and social networking software in general,” Cheng tells Microsoft Watch. “We were imagining how these things could combine. And Wallop is our first experiment in this space.”

“A lot of these ideas (RSS, wikis) are more novel and intriguing,” she says. “They are about aggregating sites and getting more information out. It matches the way people communicate.”

I’d love to be a part of the beta. However, perhaps Lili’s work will inspire the OneNote Product team to take my advice and integrate OneNote as a Wiki (err, Wallop) front-end.

John Carroll over at ZDNet has posted, IMHO one of the best overviews of Longhorn to date coming off of last weeks PDC.

Here are some good quotes from the article:

“I’ve noticed before that it is much easier to create reasonably complex user interfaces in HTML than in WIN32. For instance, it’s far easier to write a “skinnable” web site than it is to write a “skinnable” WIN32 application. Granted, you could do practically anything you wanted in WIN32, but if you wanted to escape the look and feel imposed by WIN32 controls, you had to perform a bunch of programming gymnastics.”

“Avalon is a complete upgrade to the process of writing Windows applications. In a way, Avalon turns Windows development into a more advanced and feature-rich version of web-style development. This constitutes more than just a conceptual similarity. One of the means by which Longhorn applications can be consumed is by accessing them from a web server using a browser (obviously, Internet Explorer), causing them to run within a “sandbox” managed by the .NET runtime. These downloadable applications act like more functional web pages, as they have access to the full set of rich user interface controls offered as part of the Longhorn operating system. Longhorn also makes it easy to integrate common web-paradigm concepts into desktop applications, such as page forward / page back logic, and “page history” functionality.”

I was in meetings all morning. So, I missed this report earlier, but Dave just alerted me to the Microsoft and Google news.

“Microsoft approached Google, the internet search engine, two months ago to discuss a partnership or even a merger it emerged today.”

“Google showed little interest in overtures from the company that dominates the market for operating systems.”
(via The Guardian)

This is certainly interesting, yet given MSFT’s track record in this respect, the news is not surprising. My guess is that the initial rejection by Google spured MSFT’s recent MSN Search push.

This article about integrating Google into the research pane of Office is from a few months ago, but I think relevant given that today is the official launch of Office 2003