June 6th, 2008
A Thought on SharePoint as File Server 2.0
A while ago Ed Brill had an article in his blog which mentioned SharePoint being described as File Server 2.0 (a phrase coined by Sean Burgess). This got me thinking - originally Vista was going to have a new data storage and management system called WinFS. I had even read somewhere that WinFS was going to be very much like Lotus Notes in the way it handles data. Then in June 2006 Microsoft shelved those WinFS plans. Did they pull the plug because SharePoint was going to fill that need? Basically could they make more money packaging the functionality as SharePoint that they would building WinFS into Windows? Of course there is no way to know one way or the other, but the phrase File Server 2.0 certainly did get me thinking.
Created 6/8/2008 6:16:58 PM by Philip Storry
(Philip Storry http://www.not-so-rapid.com)
Officially, it was pulled because it was too slow and it had scaling issues - it was practically useless for network usage. (Or so I heard.)
In that latter use case, SharePoint is a better alternative to WinFS anyway. It also has scaling issues, but at least they're a little easier to handle because you usually "segment" your SharePoint apps into per-department or per-project sets anyway, which makes capacity handling somewhate easier than if it was a filesystem (local or networked).
In essence, I suspect that their first issue was support. Call it a filesystem, and people will expect NTFS speed and scalability - local or networked.
The fact that canning it allows them to sell SharePoint is merely convenient compared to how much money and face it saved them if they'd shipped it.
That having been said, the WinFS work was apparently rolled back into SQL Server, and lies with them now. So I do expect to see SharePoint being the end recipient of WinFS work, albeit now requiring two sets of licenses rather than just one.