Microsoft Drops More Hints About Office 11's Highlight: InfoPath Will 2003 Be the Year of Business Forms? Eric Grevstad
Mon 2/10/03 -- Office 11, the next version of Microsoft's market-dominating productivity suite, will debut (under a name to be announced -- Office 2003? Office XL?) in the middle of this year. So far, we know that the successor to Office XP will include a newly optimized screen layout for Outlook -- displaying, Microsoft says, 40 percent more information, with special ClearType fonts and formatting to help users read e-mail more quickly -- and a free-form idea-jotting, outlining, and organizing program called OneNote (previewed here).
Today, the software giant released some more information about another new Office 11 application, which both overlaps with and extends the most eagerly anticipated addition to Word, Excel, Access, and PowerPoint. The new feature is XML (eXtensible Markup Language) support, and the program that exemplifies it -- first mentioned last fall under the codename XDocs -- has been officially named InfoPath.
InfoPath is a client application that lets users create, distribute, and fill out business forms -- combining, Microsoft promises, the familiar editing experience of Word with the structure, data-validation capability, and back-end integration of an enterprise database. InfoPath creates and gives users direct, dynamic access to XML content -- a universal format that opens company info to all kinds of applications and devices, and the foundation of Microsoft's .Net plans for data delivery via the Internet.
In addition to modifying Microsoft's supplied form-design templates or designing all-new ones, companies' in-house developers will be able to create and use their own XML schema -- structures or templates for information, so the data collected in InfoPath forms will mesh seamlessly with their firms' own databases, business processes, and servers. The idea, Microsoft says, is that companies will not only capture information that would otherwise be lost (or at least require time-wasting retyping from paper forms), but be able to define and organize it to meet their unique needs.
Today's official unveiling took place at the annual conference of the Healthcare Information and Management Systems Society, to dovetail with InfoPath's support for Clinical Document Architecture (CDA), a national XML standard used by applications in the healthcare industry.
While there are plenty of e-forms packages on the market already, InfoPath is designed to set new standards in ease of use and integration for both users and IT managers. The former get an interface patterned closely on Microsoft Word's, including rich text formatting, AutoCorrect and spell checking, and support for tables and images -- and, since InfoPath is a client rather than server-based application, the ability to work on forms on a notebook or Tablet PC away from the corporate network.
The latter get to design dynamic forms with little or no coding, even for pop-up option lists or self-populating form sections that eliminate reentry of duplicate or boilerplate info; validate or check entered data against business criteria; use XML schema to link data-entry forms to the corporate database, with no translation or manipulation required; and reuse or repurpose the gathered information in other applications, ditto.
The Forms War Begins
As eager as they are for InfoPath and other seamless XML solutions, IT managers will also be eager to see how Office 11's XML file formats work in practice. Specifically, there's widespread concern about the gap between the theoretical promise of XML -- an open-standard, never-obsolete lingua franca that'll let companies access today's data on whichever platforms and programs they're using two decades from now -- and Microsoft's well-established business model of locking customers into Microsoft formats.
For instance, while the new versions of Word and Excel will save files as XML, the default formats will use proprietary XML schema that could make them viewable by any browser, but not actually editable by other programs -- i.e., akin to Microsoft's closely guarded DOC and XLS formats today.
Microsoft says it's following the World Wide Web Consortium's XML Schema Definition (XSD) system, but wants to retain ownership of the Office 11 XSDs, instead of joining Sun, Corel, and other vendors in the Organization for Advancement of Structured Information Standards (OASIS) coalition to agree upon universal XML document formats based on those of the open-source OpenOffice.org suite.
Similarly, though Office is ultra-dominant in the desktop productivity arena, Microsoft isn't the only company interested in XML- and forms-based data integration. Coming up on 10 years after the utility's debut, Adobe Systems says half a billion copies of its free Acrobat PDF (Portable Document Format) file viewer have been distributed. And today, Adobe is marketing XML-based server and workflow solutions that add form-filling and database-back-end functionality to Acrobat.
At any rate, it seems clear that 2003's biggest software trend will be about making better use of information that's scattered across a company's zillions of documents, e-mails, and forms, as well as the information docilely organized in a few big databases -- and mixing this sophisticated back-end wizardry with even more simplicity for mere users and everyday employees. Stay tuned.
