What's behind Microsoft's Office moves?

Looming competitive and regulatory pressures factored into Microsoft's recent decision to reveal formerly secret pieces of its latest Office software, according to analysts. Microsoft announced that starting Dec. 5, customers and partners will be able to view the unique Extensible Markup Language (XML) dialects, or "schemas," used by three of the most common Office applications: Word, Excel and InfoPath.

Microsoft has made extensive XML support one of the key selling points for Office 2003, with the widely adopted standard promising more fluid exchange of data between Office documents and enterprise computing systems. The software giant attracted growing criticism for its refusal to reveal the XML schemas Office would use. Without access to the schemas, customers were ensured only of basic data interchange, without access to sophisticated formatting and organizational information included in Office documents.

Michael Gartenberg, an analyst at Jupiter Research, said such concerns became more widespread once the software hit the market, and Microsoft had to respond. XML is fast emerging as the preferred means of formatting data delivered in back-end business processes or Web services. But unlike Hypertext Markup Language tags, which are universal, XML tags can be customized by developers, and they need to communicate with software that reads them. The XML tags that define the elements of a document are collectively called a schema.

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