XFM provides several advantages including:

• A user-definable, controlled environment for capturing and maintaining geospatial features with minimum programming.
• Support for property-based symbology, meaning symbology is linked to and driven by feature attributes defined in a geospatial schema file.
• Support for property-based annotation, meaning annotation is linked to and driven by feature attributes defined in a geospatial schema file.
• Features can be created for different plot scales.
• Provides many common placement methods for placing GIS features in a file.
• Feature property data is embedded in the file, creating feature rich design files without a database connection.
• Links are not corrupted when user operations are undone or redone.