14 DAY TRIAL // Although it is keeping completely mum on the evolution of the next iterations of the Windows client, Microsoft is in fact cooking major and innovative features for both Windows 7, the successor of Windows Vista, and even for Windows 8. At this point in time, Microsoft has offered a sneak peek at Windows 7, via the Milestone 1 release, Build 6.1.6519.1, made available at the end of the past year. Still, because it is designed to integrate on top of Vista SP1 RTM and not a standalone product, M1 resembles Windows Vista more closely than it does Windows 7. However, this does not mean that Microsoft is not already hard at work on evolving Windows.
One area the Redmond company will focus on is storage, and DFS Namespaces will come into play along with additional core technologies of the Windows platform. "DFS Namespaces is employed by administrators worldwide to group shared folders located on different servers and present them to users as a virtual tree of folders known as a namespace. Extensively used scenarios like - server consolidation, increased availability of file server data, load sharing, and simplified data migration wouldn't be possible without DFSN. This is a complex technology with plenty of challenging problems to solve, and there are major, innovative features planned for the following Windows7 and Windows8 releases," Microsoft revealed (emphasis added).
The excerpt is out of a job filling on the Microsoft Careers website which is indicating the company's need for fresh blood in the Storage Solutions Division. But at the same time, Microsoft is also looking for new additions to its Data Lifecycle Management efforts. Here Microsoft has debuted work on a new project labeled File Server Resource Management Classification. FSRM is by all means still in the design phase, but will impact the development of Windows 7.
"FSRM Classification provides mechanisms for administrators to define, manage, consume and transport organization wide tagging taxonomy allowing end users and applications to associate tags with any files and be fully integrated with Shell, Explorer, Share Points, etc. Classification Infrastructure brings new enriched features for Windows 7 enabling other Windows components and ISVs to build on top of this infrastructure to deliver simplified data management and information security policies," Microsoft said (emphasis added).