The next Microsoft Office - getting clever with XML

Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer is today expected to unveil a new product intended to turn Office into a data-collection tool and boost sales of the desktop software.

Ballmer is expected to announce the product, code-named XDocs, at Gartner's Symposium and ITExpo in Orlando, Florida. XDocs is intended to make it easier for companies to generate and tabulate data using electronic forms by linking desktop documents to back end data sources.

The product is based on Extensible Mark-up Language (XML), already a popular standard for data integration. Microsoft expects to ship XDocs in mid 2003, about the same time as the next version of its productivity suite, code-named Office 11.

With XDocs Microsoft hopes to expand on the success of collaborative tools such as SharePoint Team Services and SharePoint Portal Server and better position Office as a front end to customer relationship management (CRM) and enterprise resource planning (ERP) applications, according to the company.

Microsoft wants XDocs to make Office more attractive to corporate buyers, in turn increasing sales of it and the Windows XP operating system. Microsoft controls more than 90 per cent of the desktop application market but sales have begun to slow. During the dot-com boom, many companies switched to back-end data systems that could be accessed from anywhere using a web browser. Microsoft hopes to turn XDocs into the data retrieval mechanism most Office customers would want to use, which would enhance the value of the productivity suite. Office contributes more than one-third of Microsoft's overall revenue.

Meta Group analyst David Yockelson said XDocs is "powerful because it lets me collect up a lot of related information into a tabular format", Yockelson said. "It removes the demarcation between what a spreadsheet is, what a document is, what a form is, and how I can look at and retrieve information that would be in those things."

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Joe Wilcox writes for CNET News.com.