WinFS is good but not magic

There is more to Vista’s WinFS layer than fast searching: it enables data to be linked and shared across applications. For example, using drag and drop you could link your holiday snaps with address book entries to identify the people pictured.

Any application that deals with contacts can share and extend address book data. You will not need to export or import addresses if you change your email software, because it will be able to use the same data as the old one.

WinFS blurs the distinction between documents in the file system and records in a database, enabling Windows Explorer to display both. Another neat feature, ideal for laptops, is built-in synchronisation.

There are problems, however. What’s to stop one application from messing up data shared by another?

If an item is used by several applications, which one opens up when you double-click it? If you copy a contact to a USB key, edit the XML on a Mac, and copy it back, do you update the old contact or create a new one?

Microsoft has thought about these issues, but we may not like the answers. ‘We can’t do magic,’ said speaker Shishir Mehrota.

WinFS will be superb for searching and organising Office documents and Outlook data, but its more ambitious goals will be hard to attain.

Jargon explained

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