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Microsoft Corp. on Wednesday will announce XDocs, the working code name for the latest addition to its Office desktop productivity family.
Steve Ballmer, CEO of the Redmond, Wash., software company, will use the Gartner ITxpo in Orlando, Fla., to announce this latest Office application.
Microsoft officials are promoting XDocs as a smart client like Office. “Think of it as a hybrid information gathering tool for organizations that blends the benefits and richness of a traditional word processing program with the data capturing ability and rigor of a forms package into the XDocs templates,” Scott Bishop, an Office product manager, told eWEEK.
There are two components to XDocs: the designer, which allows users to create templates and schemas; and the editor, which allows information to be inputted and viewed.
The idea is to provide users with a set of 25 templates based on industry-standard XML. That will enable developers, third parties, corporate IT programmers and technical users to create additional templates, based on the XML schema they define, specific to their business or industry. Information will then be entered onto these templates.
“That allows customers to decide, through their own schema, what that data should look like. And because its XML, we can then parse that data out of the document and send it to any XML-enabled back-end system from where it can also then be retrieved. It thus complements customers existing infrastructures,” Bishop said.
However, he declined to say how XDocs would fit with the existing suite of Office products or the next-version Office 11. He also would not confirm whether it will debut as a stand-alone product, as part of the Office suite or simply as a technological component of Office 11.
“It will be an Office family member. How it fits specifically is still being determined. No SKU decisions have been made as yet, and were working with customers to determine the optimal licensing and packaging arrangement as well as pricing,” he said.
But both Office 11 and XDocs are slated to ship around the same time, mid-2003. That will follow the first XDocs beta–expected before the end of the year–and a wider second beta next year.
Pharmaceutical firm Solutia Inc. is participating in the alpha program. Art Huggard, director of digital strategy at Solutia, said the company is exploring the impact on many internal processes–from custom purchase order solutions to clinical trial data submission.
“The validation capability within XDocs enables us to check our data against criteria that we have set, improving the accuracy of data entry. And because the data collected by XDocs is XML, we can send it directly to our clinical systems, actually eliminating a step in our clinical trials process. We anticipate that XDocs will not only speed up the flow of information, but also reduce errors, saving everyone a significant amount of time and money,” Huggard said in a statement.
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NetDocs Lives
Many of the principles and the technology underlying XDocs are the handiwork of Microsofts NetDocs team. NetDocs was the code name for the integrated application that Microsoft demonstrated at its .Net unveiling two years ago.
It included a full suite of XML-based e-mail, personal information management, document authoring tools, digital-media management and instant messaging wares.
Microsoft axed the NetDocs project in mid-2001 and moved the 400-person NetDocs team under the Office umbrella. But as recently as this year, Micrososft Group Vice President Jeff Raikes hinted that the NetDocs technology would resurface in another form.
“Regarding the project code-named NetDocs, we incubated some very important ideas, centered around XML technology, that will play an important role in our Office tools story in the future,” said Raikes in a Microsoft online chat this spring.
“At this time, we arent releasing more public information about how were using that technology–but I can say that Im very excited by the impact it will have on paperless workflow,” he added.
A Microsoft spokeswoman noted on Tuesday that technologies pioneered by the NetDocs developers will also manifest themselves in Microsoft products other than XDocs. She declined to offer further details.
The XDocs team is headed up by Peter Pathe, a corporate vice president who reports directly to Raikes, who is spearheading Microsofts “Structured Document Services” work.
Microsoft has declined to comment on exactly what the Structured Document Services is. But according to the Microsoft corporate Web site, the SDS team “is responsible for developing new products for knowledge workers that build on the foundations of the industry standard Extensible Markup Language (XML).”
“These products will provide customers with the ability to create and manage structured documents, deliver a framework for Office .NET services, and increase opportunities for third-party customization and extension of the Microsoft Office family of products,” the site says.
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