REDMOND, Wash., Nov. 14, 2002 — Jean Paoli, Microsoft XML architect and co-creator of the World Wide Web Consortium’s (W3C) XML 1.0 standard, will be a featured speaker at the IDEAlliance XML Conference & Exposition 2002 in Baltimore next month. Sponsored in part by Microsoft Corp., the conference is the world’s largest exposition on XML-based software and services. Paoli’s presentation, titled
“Bringing the XML vision to the desktop with ‘Office 11,'” will detail Microsoft’s vision for XML and provide attendees with a first look at the technical architecture in the next version of Microsoft®
Office, code-named
“Office 11.”
The presentation will take place at 4:45 p.m. EST (1:45 p.m. PST) Wednesday, Dec. 11, at the Baltimore Convention Center.
Paoli’s presentation will focus on four key areas surrounding XML:
-
The original vision of XML and the importance of enabling users to apply customer-defined schemas to their documents
-
The substantial investment Microsoft has made in
“Office 11”
to bring the XML vision to the desktop -
The technical architecture adopted to enable Microsoft Word, Excel, XDocs, the FrontPage®
Web site creation and management tool, and Access to support documents utilizing customer-defined schemas -
How the paradigm for the Office family of applications has evolved to enable customers to use the data defined by their own schemas, enabling better integration with XML Web services
“Jean Paoli was one of the key people creating XML and has been a great evangelist for the power of XML,”
said Lauren Wood, chair of the IDEAlliance XML Conference & Exposition 2002.
“XML support in Microsoft Office is a significant event for anyone using XML, and a significant accomplishment. Jean’s presentation at XML 2002 is sure to be well-attended, as is the Microsoft booth.”
Customer-Defined XML Schemas
Microsoft customers have expressed the need to capture important business information in a way that it can be reused at a later time in other documents or business processes, regardless of servers, applications or platforms. Based on this feedback, Microsoft has invested heavily in building XML into the heart of Office applications. This allows data to be separated from the way it is presented and shared across applications and processes as needed, rather than locked in specific documents. Because Microsoft recognizes the value of standards-based XML in enabling this functionality, it has built rich support for XML into
“Office 11.”
“Office 11”
goes well beyond allowing users to save documents in the XML format. It is the first productivity suite to provide support for customer-defined XML Schema Definitions (XSDs), meaning customers can structure their data in a way that makes the most sense for their business needs. As a result, companies can create customized Office solutions in documents that interact richly with other valuable XML-based Web services. This means information workers will be more effectively connected to the data and business processes they depend on to do their jobs well.
Applications Optimized for Specific Uses
With tight XML integration throughout the
“Office 11”
family of applications, customers have a number of options and can choose the application that is best optimized for their task at hand. The applications include the following:
-
Word. Customers can use Microsoft Word to create long documents with large areas of text and extensive formatting, such as a customer letter or marketing plan. Word will allow documents to be saved in XML or will support the creation of templates based on customer-defined schemas.
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Excel. Microsoft recommends that customers use Excel when analyzing data or inputting information that would be best represented in grid or tabular format. Data within any customer-defined XML schema can now be read by Excel without having to be reformatted.
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Access. For users who want to extract data from one or more tables in a database, Microsoft Access is the most appropriate Office tool. With Access, users can browse related tables in a database and choose how to export data by defining the structure of a customer-defined XSD.
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Visio. For users who want to integrate information coming from a database into a diagram, Visio®
drawing and diagramming software can maintain corporate data in a Visio XML file using a corporate schema. Users can then mine the Visio XML document to automatically retrieve data in the diagram. -
XDocs. A new application in the Office product family, XDocs is optimized for the creation of rich, dynamic forms that capture highly structured, grouped textual or numerical information with few paragraphs of formatted text. It enables customers to gather business-critical data typically captured in documents such as sales reports, inventory updates, project memos, travel itineraries and performance reviews, using any customer-defined XML schema.
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FrontPage. To display live data on the Web, users can build data-driven Web sites using FrontPage. Customers define how XML documents that follow any XSD will be displayed on the Web by authoring Extensible Stylesheet Language Transformations (XSLTs) directly in the FrontPage editor.
Bringing the XML Vision to the Desktop
The original vision of the creators of XML was to allow critical information to be captured in a way that would let an organization reuse and repurpose it in whatever processes or documents necessary. By
“unlocking”
data from the code that determines a document’s format, XML accomplished this vision. With its inclusion of rich support for native and customer-defined XML schemas in
“Office 11,”
the upcoming version of the world’s most popular productivity suite, Microsoft is taking a leading role in driving mainstream adoption for the XML standard on the desktop.
Additional information on
“Office 11”
can be found at http://www.microsoft.com/presspass/newsroom/office/default.asp . Microsoft will be located in Booth 339 at the XML Conference & Exposition.
About Jean Paoli
Since 1985, when the technology was known as SGML, Jean Paoli has been a significant player in the worldwide XML community. Paoli is one of the co-creators of the XML 1.0 standard with the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) and has long been a passionate advocate of XML. Paoli started the original XML activity at Microsoft by creating and managing the team that delivered the software that XML-enabled both Internet Explorer and the Windows®
operating system. He now works on the Office team, where he focuses on building end-user markup editing tools.
About XML Conference & Exposition 2002
Produced by IDEAlliance, XML Conference & Exposition 2002 is the latest in the XML conference series, the largest and longest-running annual gathering of XML users and developers in the world. Participants in XML 2002 can take advantage of a variety of learning formats, including technical sessions, keynote addresses, plenary sessions, informal business receptions, discussion groups and social events. This year’s event offers attendees the most comprehensive and focused program to date, with more than 100 sessions given by professionals from around the globe. More information about the XML Conference & Exposition 2002 can be found at http://www.xmlconference.org/xmlusa/ .
About IDEAlliance
IDEAlliance (International Digital Enterprise Alliance) is a not-for-profit membership organization. Its mission is to advance user-driven, cross-industry solutions for all publishing and content-related processes by developing standards, fostering business alliances and identifying best practices. More information about IDEAlliance can be found at http://www.idealliance.org/ .
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.
Microsoft, FrontPage, Visio and Windows 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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