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Story: Windows 7 Beta: screenshot gallery

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I think its a new DFS

Roger I've been playing with WIn7 in a VM and from what I can see it looks mostly like a Linux link or a Distributed Files System (a Microsoft Win 2K product that got little attention) pointer.

It doesn't actually move the files but it keeps what amounts to a URL of sorts that points to the actual location. The advantage is that you can combine different volumes, folders or shares on different computers and locations into one logical volume on the clients of the library.

The advantage would be that assuming that the user has at least read permissions to the files and folders, they can be stored someplace that can be backed up in a single operation by the IT admin or program set to do it. Different groups with write or management permissions to the different source files in "library" structure can instantly communicate updates by just doing them to the files. The library users group gets the updates without having to do anything.

DFS didn't keep track of changes or notify users of file deletions. The Sharepoint server implementation of the library functionality on the client side not only keeps track of changes but also is setup to do version control and update management when a file is being updated by two or more different users simultaneously. This is something that Windows has needed since Windows 1. VMS, VAX and IBM's 360 OS all could do versioning and file control 20 to 30 years ago.

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