"XML support in Office opens new doors that will lower barriers to access in areas such as allowing business partners and customers to access data when it is not worth it to make them a full user on your system. It does not replace existing access methods," Hickernell said.
Even that use of Office and XML might take a while because only the latest versions of enterprise applications support XML, Hickernell noted. "The lion's share of installed enterprise systems is not XML-enabled yet. Office is a little bit ahead," he said.
Key to realizing Microsoft's promise, XML schemas are also currently missing from enterprise applications, said Rob Helm, research director at Directions on Microsoft, an independent research company. An XML schema, which describes the elements in an XML document, can be used to verify that content items in a document comply with the element description.
"XML by itself is just a convention for encoding data into text. A lot of Office tools for manipulating XML won't light up until they have schemas, and those are still being developed," Helm said.
Developing custom XML schemas is an area where Microsoft sees "a tremendous business opportunity" for itself and its partners, Microsoft's Leach said.
But Microsoft's hope that a user will fire up an Office application every time there is a need to access corporate data is far from becoming a reality, according to Helm. "It will only be the pioneers," he said.
A Microsoft showcase for using the new made-for-XML InfoPath Office application instead of Word, Excel, Outlook, or PowerPoint, Cooper Tire and Rubber is one of those pioneers.
With the help of Microsoft, Cooper Tire is building an XML front end to its customized tire-mold management system. Using XML forms and InfoPath, the company will be able to track the movements of molds between its various locations, said Ron Sawyer, manufacturing IT manager at Cooper Tire.
"Right now, we do not have visibility of the molds as they are in transit, and we make estimates of how long it will take for a mold to get shipped out of one plant and arrive at the other," Sawyer said. "We are very new to using XML and wanted to stick with Office and the Microsoft tools because that is our standard."
About 40 employees at Cooper Tire will use XML forms. The forms are opened in InfoPath and interact with a Windows Server 2000 system that sends the data on to an Oracle database, Sawyer said.
Development of the tracking system took about six weeks, according to Sawyer.
Cooper Tire has no current plans to expand its XML use to other Office applications, Sawyer said.
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