One solution, which Adobe’s forthcoming XML-oriented forms designer aims to deliver, makes PDFs interactively XML-aware. Another
approach, being tested by the Association for Cooperative Operations Research and Development (ACORD), an insurance industry
organization, uses InfoPath to create forms that pass XML data to a Web service, which in turn sends back an ACORD-certified
PDF version of the form. According to Mark Munie, business development executive at Avanade, a Microsoft/Accenture joint venture
offering integration services for insurance (and other) industries, this setup combines efficient data entry with faithful
reproduction of legacy forms. As a bonus, it enables an integrator -- such as Avanade -- to deliver customized solutions by
intercepting and transforming XML data flows.
The Right Tool for the Job
Although Avanade likes InfoPath for the highly structured task of gathering insurance data, it likes Word 2003 for other purposes.
For example, Avanade is working with the State of Missouri to capture its published rules and regulations in free-form Word
documents which are then overlaid with XML metadata. In Office 2003, Word and Excel documents, unlike InfoPath documents,
offer this overlay capability. An entire document can always be saved as XML, but you can bind just a subset of a document
to a schema and manage it accordingly. It’s always been possible to attach metadata to an Office document using global properties.
With this approach, the metadata can appear anywhere in the document. A paragraph or section, for example, might be assigned
to a category and thus exposed to a category-aware search engine.
Word isn’t always the best choice for a text-heavy application, though. Hewlett-Packard is using InfoPath to overhaul the
content management system that handles its sales guides. According to Jim Fulkerson, HP’s manager of marketing field communications,
these are highly modular documents, assembled on demand, that tell a salesperson “what there is to sell, who’s the customer,
who’s the competition.” Using InfoPath to manage these content chunks has spared Fulkerson a lot of the cutting and pasting
he used to have to do to create new views of the material. And he plans to reuse the managed inventory in a variety of ways.
Given all these choices, how can you achieve the best outcomes? One aspect of Office hasn’t changed: Serious development of
layered applications is hard work. The lazy approach still makes sense. You’ll want to leverage to the hilt what the tools
do naturally, right out of the box. Here are some points for developers to consider.
Excel 2003 The sweet spot for Excel was always transfer and visualization of tabular data, and it still is. The new, low-hanging fruit
is the XML data being made available by, for example, databases that publish queries as XML to WebDAV repositories. No special
skills are required to attach to such resources in Excel 2003. You then turn them into visuals using charts, pivot tables,
or just plain old sortable columns. If you’re producing XML data, it’s simple to pull it into Excel where you can see it and
work with it.
InfoPath 2003 XML notwithstanding, InfoPath provides something the Office suite has always needed: a way to enable end-users to create
applications that gather structured data. It’s true that InfoPath can consume and feed Web services and external databases,
and these are indeed strategic capabilities. But don’t overlook the fact that an InfoPath form can also function as a mobile,
self-contained XML database that’s usable offline and transportable as an e-mail attachment.
Word 2003 The new Save as XML feature produces WordML, an annoyingly verbose but nevertheless pure XML representation of your document.
If you accumulate content in WordML, rather than in the DOC format, you’ll be able to search that repository using any XPath-capable
tool. What you are able to find, of course, depends entirely on what’s been tagged. The deluxe solution is to map a subset
of the document to an XML schema, but that entails complexity for developers and users alike. Here’s a cheap alternative:
Offer templates that promote consistent use of Word styles. This was always a good idea anyway; now those styled elements
can facilitate structured search.
Office 2003 doesn’t deliver everything on our wish list. We wish InfoPath’s rich-text editor were more robust, and generated
cleaner and simpler XHTML. We’d like simpler ways to streamline WordML, and to convert it to and from HTML. Most of all, we
wish that the most frequently used Office application -- Outlook -- had shared some of the XML goodness. But this version
of the suite takes major steps in the right direction, and creates something we frankly hadn’t expected two years ago: credible
reasons to upgrade.
Correction
In this article, the Bottom Line for Office 2003 Professional Enterpise Edition should have stated that the XML features are
available in the volume licensed Professional Enterprise and retail Professional editions.
E-mail
Printer Friendly
Reprints
(InfoWorld) - In the litigious world we live in, deploying a unified communications platform in your enterprise could...
