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September 02, 2005
Even More on WinFS
I'm rather enthused over the new WinFS development. Here is an idea from the WinFS blog that might give you some insight into what WinFS can do.
A couple weeks back, I was sitting down with one of the Microsoft recruiters (Mary) and she was showing me her computer. I was amazed. See, Mary's problem is that she can have days where she has 5 candidates on campus simultaneously in different interview loops that consist of 6+ interviewers each. She also has a long list of candidates that are coming for loops in the next week, all of which require immediate attention. So the net of it is: Mary's mailbox is a nightmare. Throughout the day, she’s getting bombarded by email. She'll get a mail that a candidate missed his interview shuttle and needs to be picked up. Or a candidate got lost and wandered into BillG's office accidentally. So all day long, she sits at her computer and adds followup flags to her mail, just trying to stay one step ahead of the onslaught.Enter WinFS. Now she goes into her recruiting app and builds a query. She calls it "candidates that are interviewing today". She comes back to her email, and selects "mail related to
” and selects “candidates that are interviewing today" as . She sets her mail app to color that set of messages bright red. And that's it. Each day, the list of "candidates that are interviewing today" gets automatically adjusted, and the right messages in her email are now marked red. And the best part is that the mail app and the recruiting app don’t need to know about each other – they just store items and queries in the filesystem and the other app picks them up and uses them.
I read that and say, "Ya, that's pretty cool." But then suppose you could do this? Suppose with the WinFS system you could come into your office in the morning and pull up a list of all customer you need to call for money? Or pull up a list of all orders scheduled to ship this week that you want to make sure go out the door?
That presumes I understand what WinFS does and I'm not sure of that.
Posted by Ted at September 2, 2005 01:08 PM