Microsoft Readies XML Editor

XDocs expected to join Office family of applications in 2003, Ballmer will announce.

Matt Berger, IDG News Service

Microsoft is introducing a new member into its family of Office products, for designing, editing, and viewing XML documents, the company's chief executive officer will announce Wednesday.

Called XDocs, the application is being described as a word processor for XML (Extensible Markup Language) content, says Scott Bishop, a product manager with Microsoft's Office group. It will support industry-standard XML, not a Microsoft flavor of the technology. Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer will detail XDocs during a keynote presentation at Gartner's Symposium/ITxpo conference in Lake Buena Vista, Florida.

In Sync With Office

Microsoft expects to release XDocs in the same time frame as Office 11, the next version of its productivity suite, Bishop says. Office 11 is expected to ship in mid-2003, and Bishop says both it and XDocs will enter beta testing by the end of this year.

However, Microsoft has not yet determined whether it will release XDocs as a stand-alone product or bundle it with other Office products or the suite. The Office suite includes Word, Excel, PowerPoint, and Outlook. Other Office family products include the HTML editor and Web page builder FrontPage and the Access database. Pricing is also not yet available.

With XDocs, users will be able to create formlike documents that can be used to collect an assortment of data, and then deliver that data in the XML format to various back-end systems, Bishop says. The documents will be designed to deliver content to any software or Web service that supports XML, including those from Microsoft competitors, he adds.

An alpha version of XDocs is already being tested by some select Microsoft customers, Bishop says.

Enterprise Uses

In one scenario, a company could create a document in XDocs that is used by a sales representative to summarize information gathered during a business trip. The sales representative could update contact information for customers visited, enter details of new customer accounts, or report personal expenses incurred during the trip. Because the data is stored in XML, the salesperson could then deliver it transparently to a selection of back-end systems, such as a customer database or an expense reporting application.

Microsoft's version of an XML editor will also be able to work offline, Bishop says. For example, a long online form could be downloaded, completed, and uploaded--fed into a Web database.

Users will be able to determine where data is delivered by tagging various fields in XDocs documents with XML "schemas," Bishop says. An XML schema is equivalent to a vocabulary that can be understood by a computer. It defines the structure, content, and semantics of XML documents. For example, the financial reporting industry has created a schema known as XBRL (Extensible Business Reporting Language) for use in electronic financial reports.

Users will be able to create their own schemas to characterize data in XDocs documents. XDocs will also ship with 25 prebuilt templates that support industry-standard schemas, according to Bishop.

Peggy Watt of PCWorld.com contributed to this report.