Less than a decade ago, many businesses and organizations faced a growing challenge: How to share information created in different data formats among disparate IT systems. Since its introduction in the late 1990s, Extensible Markup Language (XML) has gone a long way to solving these challenges, providing a standardized, yet flexible way to create common information and share both the format and the data online.

Now, Extensible Business Reporting Language (XBRL), an information-reporting standard built on XML, is helping reduce the time and other resources that companies must invest to create and submit financial reports. One of the earliest backers of XBRL, Microsoft extended its support for the standard last month when it became the first company to submit its annual 10-K report to the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) in XBRL.

PressPass spoke with Scott Di Valerio, Microsoft’s corporate vice president, Finance and Administration and Chief Accounting Officer, to learn more about XBRL and how Microsoft is helping to support the standard.