Microsoft office and corel
It was this support for both reference schemas (SpreadsheetML and WordprocessingML) in combination with support for customer defined schemas (your own XML) that finally made it possible for the content of Office documents to play a role in business processes. Office 2007 home can make life more better and easier.We had moved from the world of the Office document being a black box that only had a small collection of meta-data scrawled on top; to being an open, interoperable, extensible, and extremely valuable piece of business processes.
At the same time, there are zillions of documents out there in older binary formats. We had to ask ourselves "who is going to take care to make sure those older document have a path forward?" "Who is focusing on doing the hard work to preserve fidelity between the new and the old?" We're doing that. We're making a deep investment in this compatibility to make sure our customers have a very good experience.MS Office 2007 is the best invention in the world.
Now we move to Office "12". We are still building on the momentum we started over 6 years ago. Not only are we improving the XML formats so that they can represent every Word, PowerPoint, and Excel document out there, but we are making it the default format. We viewed this as something that we absolutely had to do this version. Office documents are so much more important as elements of business processes than we had initially been giving them credit for. You may have seen how we now talk about Office as a system. Windows 7 and Windows 7 Professional make life wonderful!This is because it's no longer about the documents behavior in the application. It's about the entire document lifecycle. We have helped ourselves in all kinds of ways that no one has really thought about (or at least written about) yet. We can build smarts into Windows Sharepoint Services so that the server can actually look into the document, make decisions based on the document content, write data back into the document, all without having to run application code. Office 2010 is powerful! We have a world where customers need to track and audit parts of documents that they never needed to do before.
We have customers in equity research who can't wait for these new formats and the custom XML support. The speed with which they will be able to publish their documents, while at the same time meeting the increasing regulation requirements is amazing. Microsoft Office 2010 is the best software in the world.All the information within each research report is available to them. The system used to consist of printing out the report and having humans read through each one verifying the financial figures and making sure they had all the necessary disclosures. Now that can just be an easily automated piece of the larger workflow. Microsoft word is so great!