Jon Udell says that the new version of Word is “a genuinely XML-capable version of Word. By that I mean, and Microsoft seems to mean, not just the ability to export to XML, or to consume SOAP services — capabilities that are in parts of Office XP today (Excel, Access). More profoundly, it’s about a writing environment that natively produces XML which is valid with respect to an arbitrary XML Schema. ”
He adds: “The endgame is what Microsoft has called the universal canvas. In the long run, that means migrating software to a common storage model. That won’t happen any time soon, but there’s a big near-term opportunity to leverage XML as an exchange format much more aggressively. I’d like to see that happen across the suite of Microsoft’s clients by the time Office 11 ships. ”
I wrote about this earlier (with reference to a ZDnet article on MS Office).
