Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer on Wednesday unveiled a new product intended to turn Office into a data-collection tool and boost sales of the desktop software.
Ballmer introduced the product, code-named XDocs, at Gartner's Symposium and ITxpo in Orlando, Fla. XDocs is intended to make it easier for companies to generate and tabulate data using electronic forms by linking desktop documents to back-end data sources.
The product is based on Extensible Markup Language (XML), which is already a popular standard for data integration. Microsoft expects to ship XDocs in mid 2003, about the same time as the next version of its productivity suite, code-named Office 11.
With XDocs Microsoft hopes to expand on the success of collaborative tools such as SharePoint Team Services and SharePoint Portal Server and better position Office as a front end to customer relationship management (CRM) and enterprise resource planning (ERP) applications, according to the company.
|