Microsoft Announces Smart Tag Software Development Kit (SDK) For Office XP

REDMOND, Wash., Feb. 21, 2001 — Microsoft Corp. today announced the immediate availability of the Smart Tag Software Development Kit (Smart Tag SDK), a free* toolkit designed to provide developers with tools and information to build flexible and customized smart tags in Office XP. Smart tags enable real-time, dynamic recognition of content and offer relevant options to people as they work to allow them to quickly access and analyze information.

Using the Smart Tag SDK, developers can now design company- or industry-specific smart tags that will tightly integrate Office XP with information from the Web, enterprise data sources and other desktop applications to expand the Office XP user experience. Using Office XP and the Smart Tag SDK, developers can quickly create solutions that lower development and deployment costs, reduce training and improve business agility.

“The ability to dynamically link user input — for instance, a supplier invoice number — with relevant user actions — such as, ‘check invoice status’ or ‘visit supplier Web site’ — using the full power of COM and development tools like Visual C++® and Visual Basic® is an enormously powerful concept,”
said Charles Maxson, director and technical evangelist for Plural Inc.
“We’re excited to work with Microsoft to deliver integrated solutions that address these specific customer needs.”

Smart Tag SDK Enables Rapid Deployment

The Smart Tag SDK includes a tutorial, programmer’s guide, API reference, registry key reference and sample code to help software developers quickly and easily build smart tags. This SDK, combined with the power of familiar development languages such as Microsoft® Visual C++ and Visual Basic, enables developers to build custom smart tags based on the unique needs of their customers and provides another significant development opportunity on the Office XP platform. The Smart Tag SDK can be downloaded from the Office Developer Center on MSDN Online at http://msdn.microsoft.com/office/ .

Office XP as a Development Platform

The availability of the Smart Tag API in Office XP builds upon the long history of Office as a development platform. Today, more than 2.6 million developers create solutions that take advantage of the Office platform. By exposing Office XP as more than 600 prebuilt COM-based components, and supporting common programming languages like the award-winning Visual Basic for Applications (VBA) and leading technologies like XML, Office XP enables developers to quickly build business solutions that take advantage of the familiar user interface of Office. Sophisticated solutions can be built for Office XP using leading-edge technology that is customizable and solves significant business problems. In addition to extensible smart tags, examples of this technology include the following:

  • XML support. Office XP offers native support of XML as a file format in Excel and Access, which enables the integration of Office XP solutions with other XML-enabled enterprise applications and business processes. XML also makes it much easier for people to extract data from Office XP documents into other XML-enabled applications using Internet standards.

  • Office Web Components. Office Web Components enable the use of interactive and refreshable Excel spreadsheets, charts and pivot tables in Web applications. New capabilities in Office XP’s Web Components reduce the need for custom coding, allowing developers to deliver new solutions to their customers more rapidly. For example, Office Web Components can be used in an organization’s intranet to allow the finance staff to manipulate and analyze large quantities of sales or financial data in a Web page.

“Microsoft is committed to providing developers with the tools and services needed to help companies remain efficient and agile,”
said Richard McAniff, vice president of Microsoft Office.
“Office XP enables developers to create solutions that lower development and deployment costs and have a positive impact on a company’s bottom line.”

Office XP will be available toward the end of the first half of 2001.

About Office XP

Office XP presents people with the tools needed to work smarter. Office XP greatly improves personal productivity through simplifying the way people work and providing tools that people can rely on; enables collaboration by making it easy to collaborate on documents and work more effectively with others; and extends Office beyond the desktop by enabling people to integrate additional services into Office and easily access information any time.

About Microsoft

Founded in 1975, Microsoft (Nasdaq
“MSFT”
) is the worldwide leader in software, services and Internet technologies for personal and business computing. The company offers a wide range of products and services designed to empower people through great software — any time, any place and on any device.

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