Ballmer to welcome XDocs to Office family

IDG News Service - Microsoft Corp. is developing a new member for its Office family of software products that will allow business users to create, edit and view XML documents, the company's CEO is expected to announce today.
The application, which has been given the code name XDocs, is like a word processor for XML and can help businesses reduce the amount of steps it takes to gather and reuse corporate information, said Scott Bishop, product manager with Microsoft's Office group.
Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer was due to provide details about XDocs during a keynote presentation this morning at Gartner Inc.'s Symposium/ITxpo conference in Lake Buena Vista, Fla.
With XDocs, companies will be able to create formlike documents that can be used by employees to collect an assortment of data and then deliver it in the XML format to various back-end systems. The software will have a similar user interface to other Office applications such as Microsoft Word.
For example, a company could create an XDocs document for use by a sales representative to collect information during a business trip. The employee could, for example, update contact information for a customer he visited, enter details about a new customer account or report expenses incurred during the trip. Because the document uses XML, the data can be delivered automatically to back-end systems such as a customer relationship management database or a company's expense reporting system.
XDocs documents will be able to deliver content to any application or Web service that supports XML, including those from Microsoft competitors, the company said.
XDocs is being tested by a handful of Microsoft's customers and is expected to go into wider beta testing by the end of the year. General availability is scheduled for mid-2003, Microsoft said.
The release of the new Office product will come in the same time frame that Microsoft releases Office 11, the next version of its productivity suite. That software suite is also expected to have built-in support for XML.
Microsoft hasn't yet determined whether it will release XDocs as a stand-alone product or bundle it with other products, as it does with Word, Excel, PowerPoint and Outlook, Bishop said.