Longhorn goes to pieces

Bill Gates' dream of an end-to-end search tool for corporate networks remains just that: a dream, at least until the end of the decade. Advanced search features that Gates has termed the "Holy Grail" of Longhorn, the next major version of Windows, won't be fully in place until 2009, Bob Muglia, the senior vice president in charge of Windows server development, told CNET News.com.

The technology, called WinFS, is an add-on the Windows file system that Microsoft says will make it easier for users to find data such as documents, e-mail messages and multimedia files--no matter what their format--on local PCs and across the network.

Microsoft does plan to include WinFS in the client version of Longhorn, which is expected to ship by mid-2006. And Muglia said WinFS will be included in the server version of Longhorn, slated to debut in 2007. However, "some of the functionality of WinFS and some of the scenarios may be limited in terms of what it can do. I don't know that we will have all of the scale to the level where we would like to have it, so that you could use it for very high-volume enterprise servers," he said.

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