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XML opens up Office 2003
Posted by: Anonymous on Dec 06, 2003 - 12:59 PM
Microsoft
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Microsoft has opened up some of its Extensible Markup Language (XML) schemas to customers and partners developing solutions based on Office 2003. The move will help firms implement document management systems using XML technology and is being offered under a royalty-free licence to encourage use of the XML specifications, Microsoft said.
The Office 2003 XML Reference Schemas, announced last month, are now available to firms looking to build products or solutions to work with the latest version of Microsoft's productivity suite. The schemas available under the licensing agreements consist of WordprocessingML, SpreadsheetML and FormTemplate, which apply to Word, Excel and the InfoPath XML forms creation tool, respectively.
Microsoft said the initiative follows discussions with the Danish government over its plans to use XML to manage documents. "The Danish government's use of standards-based XML technology shows its commitment to forward-thinking IT infrastructure and management," said Microsoft's European chairman, Patrick De Smedt. The Danish government wants to encourage better exchange of data across the public sector by creating a repository of XML schemas. Using Microsoft Office and XML may set a precedent for other European governments, he said.
One of the major new features in Office 2003, launched in October, is its support for XML. While Word and Excel are compatible with previous Office file formats, they can optionally save documents as XML files, using Microsoft-defined schemas that describe how data is stored within them. Other XML-enabled applications can use the schema to access the data in such documents.
Word, Excel and InfoPath can produce and access XML-formatted data, which lets firms link documents with data from web services or databases with an XML interface.
Observers have speculated the new move is to counter the popularity of Adobe's Acrobat PDF file format for archiving and document management. Adobe announced plans earlier this year to automate business processes by integrating its widely-used PDF document format with XML to create so-called intelligent documents. Acrobat and the latest Adobe reader are cross-platform applications, unlike Office 2003 that runs only on the latest versions of Windows.
Microsoft is making available the Office 2003 XML Reference Schemas using XML Schema Definitions (XSD), a standard backed by the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C). They can be downloaded from the first web site listed below.
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