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 NEWSMicrosoft touts Office vision By Ed Scannell and Cathleen Moore October 11, 2002 1:01 pm PT ATTEMPTING TO FORTIFY its Office suite as a rich interface for Web services, Microsoft has announced a set of technologies designed to embed business process functionality into the core of its software stack.
Slated for release in mid-2003, XDocs is intended to smooth out the sometimes cumbersome process of gathering and distributing data to and from multiple servers. Split into components for both developers and "knowledge workers," Microsoft executives explained that the application allows companies to create rich forms used by Office apps for managing business processes such as expense reports and sales call reporting. XDocs also supports XML schemas created by individual users, which can be integrated with any new or existing Web service. Company officials said it offers users the ability to reuse corporate data and improve information flow. "We think XDocs adds the missing link to the Web services story. Web services typically are talked about in terms of server-to-server relationships. But XDocs allows you to bring people into the process. They can now contribute to and consume Web services through it," said Scott Bishop, Microsoft Office product manager. But some analysts see XDocs as a strategic move on Microsoft's part to build a serious corporate knowledge-worker strategy and deliver the innovation needed to drive Office forward. "Microsoft execs have been saying they want to transform the office market into the knowledge-worker market. [XDocs] is one of the steps the company is taking in that space; expect more," said David Smith, senior analyst at Gartner in Stamford, Conn. Microsoft officials reported that Jupiter will serve as an important complement not only to XDocs but to the full Office desktop suite. "Jupiter runs a business process, while XDocs gives a flexible and standards-based way of getting that end-user information into Jupiter," said Dave Wascha, lead product manager of e-business servers at Microsoft. Microsoft is hoping that Jupiter, which combines the company's BizTalk, Commerce, and Content Management servers under one roof, will help wring out complexity and redundancy from e-business server environments. Due in two phases starting in mid-2003, Jupiter will componentize commonly used functionality in the three servers and will tap Web services technology such as BPEL4WS (Business Process Execution Language for Web Services) to allow the components to work together as a unified platform. "The big breakthrough for Office lies in XML," commented Microsoft President and CEO Steve Ballmer at Gartner's ITexpo in San Diego this week.  XML ties software stack Unified environment to help knowledge workers collaborate.
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