Mission accomplished

The next version of Microsoft Office is, among other things, a family of XML editors. I have discussed the XML modes of Word and Excel (see "XML for the rest of us" and "Exploring XML in Office 11"), and described the newest member of this family, InfoPath 2003, a tool for gathering XML data (see "Ten things to know about Xdocs"). Now that I've had a chance to work with Microsoft InfoPath 2003, Beta 2, its role and value are becoming clearer.

As thousands of recipients of the Office 2003 beta kit have already discovered, InfoPath has none of its behemoth siblings' heft. Yes, it's an Office app, but it's a new Office app, one that doesn't have to haul along 15 years' worth of accumulated cruft. You don't have to think twice about launching it. And it could probably work well as an embeddable component -- an option that many would welcome should Microsoft choose to offer it.

It's best to have a real project in hand when trying out new software, and in this case, I did. I'm working out the details of the XML API that is the Safari Books Online equivalent to the Google and Amazon query interfaces. InfoPath's creator Jean Paoli insists that the product is not a schema designer, and now I can see why. You can use the product to create a simple schema, and it will validate against any schema, but designing a complex schema is beyond its ken.

In my case and in a great many business-relevant scenarios, that detracts little from InfoPath's value. That value is simply stated. InfoPath enables nongeeks to define simple XML templates, then hand them to users who can fill them with real data. Through an iterative process of template refinement and data gathering, designers and users can collaboratively work out how the data wants to be shaped. No programming needs to happen until that cycle yields something worth the investment of programming effort. At that point, the pros can enhance the basic (but standard) XML Schema that InfoPath has produced, arrange fancy ways to distribute InfoPath documents, collect them, and weave those documents into business processes. InfoPath's genius lies not in its individual parts, but in its collaborative whole.

Starting points

When you launch InfoPath's form designer, there are a number of ways to jump-start a project. A prototype of the Safari XML API already exists, so I was able to point InfoPath at a query URL that returns XML results. As does Excel 2003, InfoPath can infer a schema from an XML sample retrieved from the file system or the Web. I separately tested InfoPath's capability of launching a new project based on data retrieved from a Web service. That works too, but only if the service uses document literal (vs. Remote Procedure Call) encoding.