Since the PDC recently held by Microsoft where they let the developer crowds in on their next version of Windows we’ve been getting reports about some of the new features we can expect. As usual there is the bunch out there who are boo-hooing anything being talked about but that was to be expected.

While they were justified when it came to Vista I don’t think the same game rules will apply to Windows 7 – there’s just so much going on and not all of it has to do with eye-candy.

A good example of something totally new to Windows 7; and is really meant to make our lives a little easier when working with machines with hard drives in the 1 Terabyte range (or more), id the introduction of Libraries. This new feature comes as a part of a restructure of what we use to know as the User Profile folder structure.

In Vista this broke down to Documents, Downloads, Photos, Videos and Music. In Windows 7 this will all change in both the naming of the User Profile folders and the Public Folders structure. From the post written by Brandon LeBlanc from the Windows Vita Team Blog; and was at PDC, this was done to accommodate this new Libraries idea

In Windows 7: Personal Documents, Personal Downloads, Personal Photos, Personal Videos, and Personal Music.

The naming also changed in the Public User Profile: Public Documents, Public Downloads, Public Photos, Public Videos, and Public Music.

These folder structure changes were made to accommodate a new Windows Explorer feature in Windows 7 called Libraries. Libraries exist in the Navigation Pane of Windows Explorer which has been updated for Windows 7. In Windows 7, users are given Libraries that consist of multiple “library locations” or folders from both their User Profile and Public User Profile.

The reason for the idea of the Libraries being available in both the Personal and Public folders and has to do with another new idea to come in Windows 7 called HomeGroup but I’m more interested in the Library idea right now so I’ll stick with it at this point. If you want a good breakdown of what the idea behind HomeGroups is then make sure to check out Brandon’s post.

What the idea of the Library folders bring to the table is that these are aggregated file type folders. In the default setup these will typically be each user’s content specific folder (Pictures, Music, Video etc) merged with the Public content folder. You can add to these as you see fit. As well you can create custom Libraries made up of abitrary locations – for example grouping all the files for an on-going project together.

Something similar could be done in Vista as custom saved searches but the problem there was that you couldn’t save files into those custom search folders. Libraries doesn’t have this same problem which means you can add to any Library folder the files you want included in that aggregated view of data.

I can definitely see how this idea of the Libraries will take some getting use to and I totally expect some serious bitching about it but I also think that once we get use to the idea it will be a big productivity bonus. Windows 7 isn’t being made out to be and one wow feature set like Vista was with the user interface. Instead it seems to be a whole bunch of incremental improvements being made to the user experience and to me this is far more important.

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