Understanding the differences between 2.6 and 3.0 and the future of WDS-Collection of common programming errors

10 years ago
admin
4 minutes

Understanding WDS and the Future

There have been many questions about WDS versions and what is recommended for use as well as development.  I will outline what the differences are in the document as well as what is coming in the future.

WDS 2.66:

WDS 2.66 is the most recent release in the 2.6x lineage of WDS.  WDS 2.6x runs in a per user context.  This means that all users have their own unique index stored in a location only they can access.  While this is sufficient for many scenarios there are a few scenarios where this hurts WDS adoption.  If you have a multi-user machine and lots of common data there is a ton of duplication in each user’s index.  You also have to pay the processing cost for each user to index data.  However, WDS 2.6x also has is hugely configurable via group policy which is a must in many deployments.  WDS 2.6x is also deployable on Windows 2000 and Windows XP and supports a very wide range of Ifilters and Protocol handlers.

WDS 3.0:

WDS 3.x is the platform of the future.  This was our attempt to majorly revise the architecture for WDS in order to better support a Windows search platform that allows many applications to build on.  We expect many applications to build on this framework and future iterations of this new architecture.  WDS 3.X runs as a system service.  One big advantage of this is that there is only 1 index per machine.  This makes WDS a much more suitable for multiuser environment.  This also helps limit processing load for indexing some data stores because the system service can run while the user is not logged in.  However, certain stores that are user specific, like e-mail, can only be indexed when the user is logged in.  Even though WDS 3.x has a single index it is still very secure.  The index will only broker information to the user that his or her user account has access to.  WDS 3.0 has also taken steps to improve the security  technology that WDS 2.6 implements.  Some Ifilters and Protocol handlers that worked with 2.6x will not work with WDS 3.0.  WDS 3.0 requires all Ifilters and Protocol handlers to use IPersistStream to access data instead of direct file access.  Since WDS 3.0 is a system service it is more important to restrict direct file access because of the privileges a system service has on files.  All of the updates and changes will be called out in the upcoming Admin Guide and SDK (Late February).

WDS 3.0 or later is also required if you want to deploy Microsoft Outlook 2007 with instant search capabilities on Windows XP.  The WDS 3.0 architecture is already part of Windows Vista so there is no need to install any Windows updates to allow functionality.  Instant search will be available as soon as you install Microsoft Outlook 2007 on a Vista machine.

WDS 3.0, however, did not come with much group policy support.  The majority of Group Policy support will be added in WDS 3.01 which will be released around late February.  3.01 will also address some top Watson crashes and other improvements to the 3.0 codebase.  The 3.01 update will add the group policy support that was implemented in the 2.6x versions.

Future Dates:

·         WDS 3.01 released – late February

·         WDS 3.01 admin guide – late February

·         WDS 3.01 ADM template – late February

·         WDS 3.x SDK – late February

  1. Guys, you are breaking these public release dates without any notice to people who are having their project on the line due to your inability to release complete and correct SDK for this platform.

    Will someone answer this post and tell us when the SDK will be out (this time for real)?

  2. The SDK is in the process of being release. We are experiencing a few infrastructure issues that is not making our changes propagate online. This should be resolve in the next couple days. Thank you for your patience on the slight delay of the release.

  3. Eric,

    People are having major problems with WDS 3.01 losing index files or reindexing when they go offline from their networks.  No answers from MSFT have been forthcoming.  With support like this, the future of WDS looks bleak.  Can you suggest what the proper support channel from MSFT is?

    Tim