It has been a fascinating year since I had the honor to present at last year’s XML conference how Office 2003 XML was helping to bring the XML vision to the Desktop. With the support of custom-defined XML schemas for documents and XML Web Services, Desktop applications become the ideal front-end to connect documents to cross platform and heterogeneous back-end business processes, thanks to open standards.

It has been our dream, from the SGML days to the XML era, to enable the mass-market, the end users, to access, modify, analyze and store semantically marked up documents. This dream is becoming a reality with Office 2003 XML. During the last year, I had the joy and happiness to witness so many applications that our users have designed around this vision. Now that Office 2003 XML recently shipped, it is my believe that the most important goal is to help, at a large scale, end users and businesses understand the value of this new approach, to listen to their needs when they develop their desktop applications using XML documents and to learn from their experience in order to develop the new tools and methodologies that will be needed in the future and to learn how they interoperate with a large set of cross-platform back-end systems.

The capability of supporting custom-defined schemas is at the core of the XML Vision for the Desktop because now organizations can now actually create their own XML schemas specific to their business, define the structure and type of data that each data element in a document can contain and enable the capture and reuse of critical information by end users using the standard desktop user metaphor they are familiar with.

There is a wide scope and variety of XML Desktop business applications and I detail below a few of them in order to show the different functions helping end users achieve their business goals. This is by no mean a complete list of how users can take advantage of XML on the Desktop and my goal is to communicate in practical terms the advantages of our vision. All of those applications use custom-defined XML schemas on the Desktop, using the Microsoft Office 2003 Professional Edition to enable non-technical non XML-savvy users to create, analyze and interact with XML documents in their business processes. Those applications communicate through open standards with backend systems implemented in a wide variety of platforms based such as Windows, Linux, Unix and others. It is important to note that end-users using those systems never think in term of using XML to complete their jobs but think in term of using templates with a word processor, using a spreadsheet, or filling a form.

Protecting public safety in a state located on the US East Coast requires 1652 uniformed officers, throughout 8 Troops and 54 districts. To manage and report on the various activities of a large public organization, the State Highway Patrol uses over 500 forms. Some of these forms are electronic, while others are paper-based. In all cases, the process for filling out, submitting and managing the forms is a manual and time-consuming process. As a result, the State Highway Patrol was seeking a better solution for their form-based management and reporting system. Their key requirements for this solution are a centrally managed system, easily created forms and smooth integration to backend systems.

The State Highway Patrol developed a custom-defined XML schema for the standard weekly activity report form and designed a Microsoft Office InfoPath 2003 form generating XML documents belonging to that schema. After being deployed to pilot users in the field, Patrol Officers were able to electronically fill out their reporting form and automatically submit to their back-end reporting system. Next step will be to insert an automated administrative audit and approval option that will expedite the administrative and even further reduce processing time. With the integration to the back-end reporting system, re-keying data, which was a necessity before, can be completely eliminated. It was discovered during the pilot program that moving from the old manual process to the new automated process with Microsoft Office InfoPath 2003, the State Highway Patrol can anticipate reducing the overall time required creating and managing this one reporting function from 276 hours per week to 138 hours.

An important healthcare company decided to improve their annual, web based performance review process so that it becomes very easy for their employees to submit their performance reviews. The performance review process occurs once a year and is used to support and determine year-end performance review and ratings against their annual goals. Goals are done at the beginning of the year (and modified throughout), so the application is used continuously. While the current application does provide a number of benefits over a completely paper forms based alternative, it does have a number of drawbacks the healthcare company wanted to address. Employees have suffered from lost work and time due to web application timeouts and dropped network connections. They were also limited to entering their information in plaintext. Finally the web application did not provide spell checking. So in order to work around some of these disadvantages, employees will develop their performance reviews offline in Word and then cut and paste the information into the web application. Also the current system lacks an important component of the performance review process which is soliciting peer/customer feedback on the employee’s performance.

The company decided to develop a solution using InfoPath, interacting using XML Web Services, in a cross-platform environment, with BEA WebLogic (® ) and an Oracle (® ) database in order to streamline the review process. InfoPath forms were developed to read the WSDL web services description from the BEA platform and generate custom-defined XML as requested by the BEA application. The InfoPath application can be used offline, so there are no performance issues coming from dropped networks connections and timeout errors. Rich-text formatting and spell checking provides employees the ease of use of the classic document metaphor and the integration with web services enables InfoPath to save the review documents to the back end process and to orchestrate the feedback workflow.

The case and office management system in use at a central England-based Counsel firm in civil and criminal litigation, long provided a global structure and processes for document production and information retrieval. But it required a high level of intervention on the part of users—lawyers, paralegals, and other staff, who need immediate and timely access to more than 60 gigabytes of internal information and an even greater volume of external informationto take full advantage of the system’s powerful capabilities. For example, the firm has a vast knowledge base and library of precedent templates. But because of the scope and volume of those resources, users are not always aware of the content that is available to them. As a result, they might often spend time and incur costs re-keying text or re-creating existing material.

The firm decided the use the XML capabilities and accessibility of the Research Library of Microsoft Office 2003 Professional Edition to exploit the integrated search functionality of the Research Library and smart document technologies—for one-click access to billable tasks, templates, and reusable text from within the task pane. For example, when a lawyer is working on a brief, he or she can use the Research task pane from within Microsoft Office Word 2003 to pull in all relevant prior rulings and other historical and client information. To fill out the myriad court-required forms for litigation, the lawyer can use smart documents to automatically enter reusable text and data. When it’s time for billing, that same lawyer can retrieve a highly detailed record of hours worked on any given case without having to leave the Office environment.

A German-based company that sells computer products and peripherals through a network of retail outlets uses a CRM system (Microsoft Business Solutions–Navision) which helps them manage all regional sales and marketing data, but it wanted to provide executives, sales and product managers, and sales representatives with a visual representation of this data to extend its value to the organization. The sales company developed an XML solution that provides an automatic process for users to extract data from the Customer Relation Management system and import it into an Office Excel 2003 workbook using the custom-defined XML schema support in Excel 2003. With Excel, statistical analysis of the information enables product managers and sales representatives to better understand the parameters of the business.

The company created a new dialog function in Microsoft Navision called Create Statistical Pool that allows users to define which data should be exported to Excel. Because of the size of the database, data must be aggregated before it can be exported. The dialog is a flexible starting point for different statistical evaluations because users can define the XML schemas they require and use each independently of the options in the dialog box. To date, ten Excel worksheets and five XML schemas have been defined; for example sales data can be structured with or without salespeople. With multiple XML schemas and worksheets available, users have a variety of options for collecting and analyzing the sales and marketing data.

To successfully market and sell its products, a computer research and manufacturer company needed to provide its sales team with the latest information about its newest products quickly and efficiently. The availability of accurate and current product information is critical because it enables the company’s sales team to drive more sales. Utilizing the Microsoft Office System 2003 and Groove (®) Workspace, the computer company automated the publishing of sales guides to its intranet and reduced the effort and cycle time required to create and update marketing content through improved collaboration and document management.

InfoPath forms are used to collect, submit, and publish content in XML using custom-defined XML schemas describing the products. A central project repository is used for efficient storage, process control, and reuse of sales guide content and the collaboration tools facilitate content changes and status updates as a document moves through the publishing process. Groove Workspace enables content contributors to access project information offline or outside the company’s firewall.

A college in northeastern England built an Office 2003 XML-based application to automate the processing of self-assessment reports. Teaching staffs complete faculty self-assessment reports by using information that is derived from a broad range of sources in a diverse set of formats. These sources include retention and achievement statistics for benchmarking purposes (in Microsoft® Excel), external verifier reports (in Adobe ® PDF), statistics on student and employer perceptions (in Microsoft Word, Access, and Excel), external audits, and college-generated enrollment and post-graduation employment statistics. Pulling data from these various sources and reconciling their diverse formats constituted a tedious and time-consuming process for faculty and administrative personnel, consuming two to three days of time every quarter.

The solution uses Office Professional 2003 core programs such as Word and Excel to develop tools supporting the gathering and analysis of data from a single point of access. The XML capabilities in Office 2003 allow users to retrieve the varied data for the faculty self-assessment reports directly from a Word 2003 research pane. In this way, the solution provides easy access to each of the nine required data sources to complete the self-assessment form. The solution provides teachers a link to information relating to only the courses they taught. A large college might have 160 full-time and 1,000 part-time courses the XML solution eliminate the need to go through data relating to all courses to get to the information pertaining to the few courses needed for each teacher to complete the self-assessment report.

A Legal publisher based in British Columbia developed an XML publishing system based on Microsoft Office System to open new sales channels for its book-publishing division. The company produces rich online content for distribution over the Internet. The new publishing system produces material that can be simultaneously distributed as print documents and as rich online content.

The publisher’s editors now mark up Word documents using XML tags to describe structure and content instead of using styles that describe formatting, allowing authors to focus on creating better content instead of worrying about fonts. The Microsoft Office System solution is integrated into the IT environment so that the Web content management solution and Web style sheets take care of layout and formatting of the online product. While working in Word, Editors can quickly access information in the company’s Microsoft Business Solutions–Great Plains® system, which it uses to manage product inventory, contributing authors, courses offered, and financial data. The solution also integrates with a case and statute reference database and other data repositories to import information directly into the XML documents. As an example, the publisher’s production team used recently the new solution to convert a 1,600-page manual for publishing online. The online version comes complete with links to full-text cases and legislation, downloadable forms and precedents, and full-text searching across the entire publication.

A manufacturer of replacement tires and original equipment automotive components was using an outdated mainframe application to track tire curing molds as they were moved between several facilities. There was no efficient way for planners to see details of mold movements between plants or storage locations. Employees relied on communications via phone, e-mail and fax to track mold movements instead of a common application. Any delays in getting a mold to a curing press could mean lost productivity and have a negative impact on customer service.

The manufacturer developed custom-defined XML Schemas and implemented a Microsoft Office InfoPath 2003 solution so employees can use XML-enabled forms to view, enter and share all required information (using the XML Schemas) about tire mold movements, locations, and use in the tire manufacturing facilities.

A Research-driven pharmaceutical company decided to use InfoPath for the creation and reporting of Serious Adverse Events (SAE) by groups conducting the clinical programs and by clinical investigators. The previous process consisted in an inefficient manual process for reporting Serious Adverse Events (SAE). Duplicate manual data-entry into a Word document and into the Company database introduced the potential liability because of FDA regulations for SAE reporting.

The pharmaceutical company decided to automate the SAE process using InfoPath for SAE form and BizTalk for routing information into multiple and cross-platform backend systems. A custom-defined XML Schema was created to encode the structure of the SAE report and an InfoPath form enabled users to capture the information in XML belonging to custom-defined schema. The XML created by using InfoPath is sent then to the BizTalk server that automates the information flow between users. As a result, the time required for investigators to report SAEs was reduced and the accuracy of SAE information collected increased.

An Airline company based in Brazil decided to automate the weekly collection and presentation of data for the Flight Timeline Board using XML on the Desktop. The company uses a Flight Timeline Board to analyze flight profitability. However, gathering the data to build this tool required an analyst from the planning department to spend up to three days typing data into a Microsoft® Excel spreadsheet for use by other staff. The company wanted to automate this process so everyone could access current flight data on demand. With the XML capabilities of Office Excel 2003 and by leveraging the XML feeds from its reservation system to update the Flight Timeline Board every morning, users no longer work with three-day-old data. Instead, they have on-demand access to a dynamically populated, customized worksheet that depicts a schematic, chronological flight flowchart.

The solution works with an XML Web service to extract information from the reservation system. Users can input date ranges and build charts and filters on the selected dates to allow for better data visualization. The application then asks for the data from a Web service that executes a search in the SQL Server database before inserting it into the spreadsheet. The information fetched from the database is sent through the XML Web service and then can be loaded in Excel by using Excel’s support for custom-defined XML Schemas

It is my believe, as we learn from the use cases described in this paper and we listen and learn from numerous other examples in the industry, that we are starting to witness the beginning of an entire new era of business applications using XML on the Desktop. The wide adoption of open standards and the advantages of using custom-defined schemas are bringing us toward realizing our vision and our dream to enable the mass-market to access, modify, analyze and store semantically marked up documents. I will share during the XML conference some trends and needs for the future of XML on the Desktop that I was able to learn from talking to numerous users and industries.