Microsoft’s
Office 11: Is It A Platform?
Microsoft
Office 11 seems to be positioned by Microsoft to be more than
just a new release of an existing and very popular product.
 |
It’s
sufficiently powerful (or power-hungry) that it requires an
operating system upgrade to Windows XP
|
|
It
starts to fit into the world of .NET and Web Services with
enhanced XML support
|
|
For
the first time, not just for Microsoft but for any Office
Suite,
the emphasis may be on getting to the data in the suite’s
applications and keeping them updated (perhaps from outside
data sources) or letting them update other applications. |
This
is in strong contrast to previous Office Suites which largely
emphasize individual personal productivity applications,
especially word processing and spread sheets.
The Microsoft investment in Office 11 is much higher than
investments in
previous versions of Office according to Jean Paoli, Microsoft’s
architect of XDocs.
Paoli says that Microsoft started thinking about three years ago
about
the role of XML in Office. “The important thing,” Paoli
said,” is not the software that created the data, but the data
itself.” So the goal becomes to get to that data from any
tool and XML becomes a convenient way to do that.
When Microsoft did customer interviewing as they formulated their
plans
for Office 11, they found customers consistently referred to
“disconnected islands of data,” including documents, data in
databases, and data in email. So the idea was to place this
customer need – and a solution for it – at the center of the
XML strategy for Office 11.
It’s The Data, Stupid
Microsoft believes the XML focus in on the back-end, not the user
interface or the document structure. XML is already
supported as data and work flow on all data bases and application
servers – it’s important to create a useful infrastructure for
Office tasks before we concern ourselves, says Microsoft, with
structured documents.
This (that infrastructure for data) should be done by each
vertical industry, because that’s where the knowledge of
what’s needed exists. Such infrastructure could be provided by
IT analysts or by a user with skills equivalent to a high-end
Excel user. These schema creators would need to know
something about data modeling but would not necessarily be
programmers. (Paoli says a schema would take a few days to a
few weeks to craft, depending on complexity.) The rest of the
world would be
divided into Template Creators who would use objects from the
schema to
create templates in a kind of drag-and-drop mode and Template
Users who would only need to know how to fill in the template.
The Standards Thing, One More Time
This means Microsoft is looking at XML quite differently than the
current Sun/Corel/Boeing/Arbortext/etc., etc. OASIS initiative to
create an XML document standard around Sun’s StarOffice formats.
(Microsoft is an OASIS member, so it could choose to join this
committee at any time,
but so far it’s adopted a wait-and-see attitude.)
The Sun folks are looking for a standard to permit
interoperability, which they claim is impeded because MS Office
doesn’t publish its file formats. They seem unconcerned,
for the short term, as to whether Microsoft will choose to
participate, since they look at this as a long run play and are
hoping to put pressure on Microsoft.
We asked Sun’s Nancy Lee if this was likely to end up as an XSD-compatible
format (since that would satisfy Microsoft) and she said
that was very likely, but up to the committee. We suspect
that Sun and
Microsoft are up to such different things that it will be easy for
them to agree on this one.
Tools
Microsoft will provide a new set of tools, currently code-named
Visual Studio Tools for Office to permit Visual Studio.NET
developers to use their familiar tools for applications that run
Word and Excel. VB Applications will also support Office 11.
The beta release of Office 11, features enhanced support for XML,
including improved object model programmability, the ability to
use XML
schemas, built-in support for XML Web services and a new smart
document solution model. Word and Excel templates can be
designed with an underlying customer-defined XML structure, based
on corporate,
departmental or industry wide schemas, enabling developers to
build a
document-based application with context-specific help and
supporting
information. This ensures that end users can enter and view valid
data
without having to understand or work directly with XML.
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