Microsoft’s unified app goals comes into view

Through its fervent adoption of XML, Microsoft is edging closer to crystallizing its long-held dream of building bridges that foster seamless transport of data between its suite of desktop applications and back-end applications.

With the delivery by mid-2003 of its much anticipated and newly named Office 2003 desktop suit, the second beta of which is due in March, the company will have established a vital piece of software that could significantly increase XML adoption across the industry.

“Most vendors are becoming much more XML-friendly and consequently it [XML] is changing the nature of applications vendors business,” said John Jerome, an analyst with The Yankee Group in Boston. “If Microsoft continues to lace its Office applications with XML, most users will have a more seamless flow of information between the heavy-duty, back-office financial applications and desktop applications like Word and Excel.”

Jerome and other industry observers believe that XML is starting to have a game-changing impact on application development and integration. Many think it will positively influence the fundamental economics of implementing enterprise solutions.

“XML is having a pretty dramatic impact on integration costs all the way around,” Jerome said. “It makes it considerably less expensive to move information from Point A to Point B.”

Many IT administrators face a growing dilemma over the amount of critical data that is locked in desktop applications, such as Word and Excel, which can not be easily accessed and shared among other desktop applications and back-end systems.

“If you write a contract in Word and you have an application some place that keeps track of contract terms — and you want to make sure the purchasing you are doing with a particular supplier is consistent with those contract terms, today it would be very difficult to do that,” said John Jerome, an analyst with The Yankee Group in Boston. “Users need to take that Word document and pull the key pieces of data out and put it into a contract management system so you can enforce purchasing regulations against that contract.”

In this scenario, users could make their XML-based data readily available to their contract management system, which would produce a “rippling effect of efficiencies,” in that all purchases would automatically be checked for contractual compliance, Jerome said.

With the arrival of Visual Studio Tools for Office, also in March, and Microsoft’s forms engine InfoPath (formerly XDocs) Microsoft wants to push Office 2003 suite further into enterprise applications.

At last week’s VSLive conference in San Francisco, Microsoft executives explained that although Visual Studio Tools for Office is built around leveraging Word and Excel, XML will allow it to embrace other Microsoft apps, including Access, Visio, Outlook, SharePoint and Microsoft CRM.

“Long term, the burden for us is to bake [XML] into the products,” said Robert Green, Microsoft Visual Studio lead product manager, also in the company’s Redmond, Wash., headquarters.

Visual Studio Tools for Office currently enables developers to map XML data located anywhere in the network into a spreadsheet, for example. Visual Studio Tools for Office features a security model in which only code can be run from trusted locations or documents.

Ultimately, the ability to exchange XML data with Microsoft CRM “would be a great scenario,” Green said.

The rollout of Tools for Office coincides with Microsoft’s continued development of forms-based application integration with InfoPath.

The application aims to make it easy for end-users to edit forms using XML. The forms can be used to extract and send business data to and from business applications running on back-end systems, and can help cut down on paperwork and reduce errors associated with manual data entry, according to Microsoft.

“We’re not trying to replace VBA [Visual Basic for Applications], we’re trying to provide additional tools for Visual Studio developers,” Green said.

One analyst said InfoPath provides a powerful interface for designing forms that can be manipulated by end-users. It will draw on the familiarity developers have with Microsoft’s collection of Office applications. But the software maker has its work cut out in making InfoPath successful, said Ted Schadler, principal software analyst at Forrester Research, in Cambridge, Mass.

For starters, Schadler said, organizations must be persuaded to invest in the technology by having their developers design the various forms for their business.

“In order for this to have any value, someone has to link it into a business application, so they’ve got a big delivery challenge. They’ve got to convince developers to build front ends, convince their partners to take on the challenge,” Schadler said.

The technology also depends on upgrading back-end systems to support the exchange of XML data. Some ERP and CRM systems do support XML, Moore noted, although their implementation has occurred only gradually.

Microsoft has said that InfoPath will debut mid-year, or around the same time Office 2003 is due.

It will be sold as a stand-alone product in Microsoft’s family of Office applications, Moore said. Microsoft hasn’t decided whether InfoPath will be offered as part of its Office suite.

Moore said InfoPath will allow users to add additional fields to forms as needed. For example, a tax form might display fields for information about four family members. If the person filling out the form has more than four, they can click a button to repeat the fields.