Microsoft has big aspirations for streamlining business processes using Office 2003. The key is XML and Web services. Microsoft’s strategy is promising, but you will need some in-house XML expertise to set up the ideal system.
According to a recent Gartner Research report, more than half of North American companies surveyed plan to invest in Web services for business-to-business transactions within the next two years. These Web services, which will rely on XML-based standards such as SOAP and WSDL, allow disparate systems and computers to talk to one other in an easily understood language.
Best online Microsoft MCTS Training, Microsoft MCITP Certification at certkingdom.com
The Streamlined Enterprise But while an enterprise’s servers, databases, and various processes may support XML, too many old-fashioned programs are creating noncompliant documents with data that is not XML-friendly. Take a budget created in Excel or an expense report created in Word, for example. The data in such documents is essentially locked inside and not easily moved to other systems that need it. Most likely, the expense reports will need to be entered into a corporate system, and someone will need to do this manually.
Instead of effectively trapping corporate data inside Word, Excel, and Access, Office applications can now store it natively in XML, which means the data can easily move across machines and applications. For example, your company’s standard format for budgets can be defined once, and then reports can be completed in Excel and consumed via Web services in an enterprise system.
A new application, Microsoft InfoPath 2003 (available with Office 2003 Professional Enterprise Edition), simplifies bridging the gap between databases, XML schema, and Web services. The program is a very flexible form designer and filler that, in accordance with XML’s promise, effectively separates the underlying data from its presentation, letting it be easily viewed and manipulated in the most appropriate manner.