Microsoft Corp. today announced the immediate availability of the Smart Tag Software Development Kit (Smart Tag SDK), a free* toolkit designed to provide developers with tools and information to build flexible and customized smart tags in Office XP. Smart tags enable real-time, dynamic recognition of content and offer relevant options to people as they work to allow them to quickly access and analyze information.

Using the Smart Tag SDK, developers can now design company- or industry-specific smart tags that will tightly integrate Office XP with information from the Web, enterprise data sources and other desktop applications to expand the Office XP user experience. Using Office XP and the Smart Tag SDK, developers can quickly create solutions that lower development and deployment costs, reduce training and improve business agility. "The ability to dynamically link user input -- for instance, a supplier invoice number -- with relevant user actions -- such as, 'check invoice status' or 'visit supplier Web site' -- using the full power of COM and development tools like Visual C++® and Visual Basic® is an enormously powerful concept," said Charles Maxson, director and technical evangelist for Plural Inc. "We're excited to work with Microsoft to deliver integrated solutions that address these specific customer needs."