ORLANDO, Fla., April 9, 2001 — Today at the Office Deployment and Development Conference (ODDC) in Orlando, Fla., Microsoft Corp. announced groundbreaking new solutions built on the Microsoft® Office XP platform. During his keynote address, Steven Sinofsky, senior vice president of Office at Microsoft, introduced Office XP solutions built using extensible smart tags and XML, which enable customers like Medicity Inc., provider of a secure, vendor-neutral Internet platform for physicians, and National Oilwell Inc., a top global manufacturer of oil equipment, to increase their productivity and sales, and improve their bottom line. In addition, Microsoft unveiled the Office XP Developer product, the Office XP suite designed to enable professional developers to quickly build and deploy powerful business solutions.
“We’re excited to work with developers to design solutions that help customers be more agile in the new economy,”
Sinofsky said.
“Office XP opens the door to new opportunities for developers to quickly create custom solutions that lower development and deployment costs and improve their customers’ productivity.”
Improving Productivity Through Smart Tags and XML
At the ODDC, Medicity, a company that provides physicians and staff with single sign-on access to data from laboratories, hospitals, imaging centers and other healthcare enterprises, demonstrated how it created an Office XP solution to streamline the typically arduous patient notification process. Previously, patients would be notified of abnormal laboratory results by a letter generated manually by office staff with the help of the physician. With Office XP, physicians will be able to respond to patients more quickly and more accurately than ever before. Using an Office XP solution built with smart tags — icons that appear onscreen as people work to enable dynamic recognition of data — and XML technology, an abnormal test result will automatically trigger a smart tag option to supply the necessary patient information when an employee writes a letter to the patient. As a result, physicians and staff can create accurate letters in seconds, leaving more time to focus on providing patient care.
“Our company is committed to using the power of the Internet to improve the practice of healthcare, and Office XP will help us achieve this goal,”
said David Coyle, president of Medicity.
“Office XP innovations such as smart tags will enable us to link our customers with vital patient information and improve communication among healthcare professionals. Through Office XP technologies, Medicity can offer more services to clients, further integrating patient data into the office workflow and driving down the cost of healthcare.”
Increasing Revenue: XML Support and Integration With Microsoft Enterprise Servers
In addition, Microsoft highlighted how National Oilwell will improve its business processes by using Office XP as a development platform. The company, which designs and manufactures a comprehensive line of drilling equipment around the world, needed a solution that would scale to its complex operations and improve the proposal document development and management process. National Oilwell worked with Immedient Corp., a Microsoft solution partner, to create a versatile Office XP solution that helps employees quickly generate proposals using Word 2002 running in a digital dashboard and XML technologies. The solution also seamlessly integrates with Microsoft .NET Enterprise Servers to enable employees to quickly access and assimilate information into their proposal. National Oilwell is taking advantage of smart tags to rapidly link its employees with accurate information on materials, customers, vendors and equipment that resides in the Microsoft .NET Enterprise Servers, to make more informed decisions.
“The new Microsoft .NET and the Office XP solution with smart tags provides a powerful and versatile platform for developing custom e-customer relationship management solutions that are far easier for customers to learn and use,”
said Mike Brul
é
, vice president of Immedient.
“The solution substantially reduces the time and cost to produce a complex, highly detailed proposal, while increasing the professionalism and the quality of our presentation,”
said Pat Sullivan, vice president of Customer Support for National Oilwell.
“We have more than just a tool that captures and organizes the information necessary to build a proposal. We also have a comprehensive knowledge-management system for the training of new staff and customers so that they can be included in the proposal process. This valuable solution enables National Oilwell to become part of our customers’ strategies, which generates higher revenues and profits for our company.”
Office XP Developer Product Announced
Microsoft also unveiled the Office XP Developer product, the Office XP suite designed for professional developers who build and deploy Microsoft Office XP solutions. Office XP Developer includes Microsoft Office XP Professional, the FrontPage® 2002 Web-site creation and management tool, and professional development tools, documentation and sample code for quickly building Microsoft Office XP solutions. In addition, developer-only versions of Exchange 2000 Server and SQL Server™
2000 are included in Office XP Developer. Tools and resources include the following:
Developer Tools
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Workflow Designer for Exchange 2000 Server. Developers can design and build collaborative workflow and tracking solutions. They can easily define information flow and create business rules within Exchange 2000 Server-based solutions, such as Office document routing.
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Workflow Designer for SQL Server. Developers can design and build solutions that automate business processes on SQL Server data. They also can quickly build Web-based solutions that automate a series of tasks, designate task order and assign permissions on who can perform them.
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Dashboard Project. Developers can design and build digital dashboards and Web parts.
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Integrated with the Microsoft development environment. Developers can design and build a shell environment that is designed to be convenient and familiar to developers who work with the other Microsoft professional development tools. The integrated environment includes the Workflow Designers, Dashboard Project and the Code Librarian.
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COM Add-in Designer. Developers can easily create standardized add-ins for use in any Office application.
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Microsoft Visual SourceSafe
™
version control system with Visual Basic
®
for Applications (VBA) integration. Developers can reconcile file changes and prevent accidental code overwriting using Check In/Out file locking and differencing, from within VBA.
Developer Productivity Tools
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Code Librarian. Developers can increase productivity by reusing code from a comprehensive, searchable and centralized database that comes with thousands of lines of prewritten code for standard routines for Office XP and VBA.
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VBA productivity tools. Developers can quickly build solutions with the VBA add-ins that work in any product hosting VBA 6.0. Tools for automatic error handling, code commenting and code transfer are included.
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Printed developer documentation. Developers can learn how to develop solutions with Office from over 800 pages of printed developer documentation.
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Developer-only versions of Exchange 2000 Server and SQL Server 2000. Developers can develop and test solutions using developer-only versions of Exchange 2000 Server and SQL Server 2000.
Deployment Tools
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Packaging Wizard. Developers can package applications for installation and deploy via a network or the Internet. The Packaging Wizard guides developers through the steps of identifying dependency files for solutions built with Office and builds professional setup routines for easy user installation.
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Run-time version of Microsoft Access 2002. Developers can redistribute Microsoft Access solutions without requiring Access on the desktop with this royalty-free run-time version of Access.
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Code Librarian Viewer. Developers can distribute their own Code Librarian databases, with the freely redistributable Code Librarian Viewer, to users who do not have the Code Librarian to view and retrieve code snippets.
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Microsoft Data Engine (MSDE). This SQL Server-compatible data engine for storing data in Microsoft Access is fully redistributable and available royalty-free with Microsoft Office XP Developer.
About the Office Deployment and Developer Conference
More than 1,000 IT professionals and developers are attending the ODDC, to receive the latest development and deployment information on Office XP. More than 80 sessions are being delivered by Office deployment and development experts on Office XP technologies such as smart tags, SharePoint™
Team Services, Office Web Components and XML, and on how Office XP integrates with products such as Exchange 2000 Server, SharePoint Portal Server and SQL Server 2000.
About Office XP
Office XP provides a much smarter work experience for individuals, teams and organizations. Office XP makes productivity simple for individuals by helping them get the most out of Office and giving them tools they can rely on. Office XP enables collaboration for everyone by revolutionizing the way people work with others on documents and introducing SharePoint Team Services to manage projects and activities via the Web. Office XP also provides a flexible way to solve business needs by offering a rich solutions platform, improved security and reliability, and tools businesses need to deploy and manage Office.
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.
Microsoft, FrontPage, Visual SourceSafe, Visual Basic and SharePoint are either registered trademarks or trademarks of Microsoft Corp. in the United States and/or other countries.
The names of actual companies and products mentioned herein may be the trademarks of their respective owners.
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http://www.microsoft.com/office/
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