The standard edition of Office 2003 will not allow an organization to create a custom XML schema that it can publish and share with its partners, Smiley said. That feature will be available in only the professional and enterprise versions of the product. In the less expensive, standard version, information saved in XML will be stored in the Microsoft native XML schema, a schema that up until now Microsoft has not published.
There"s no way around it. Microsoft Office 2003, the upgrade to Microsoft"s productivity suite set to be released in the second half of this year, is a "tweener." It is not a major upgrade that ushers in a new era of features and functionality, but it does provide a number of welcome enhancements, especially for enterprise users.
Office 2003 has some compelling elements that will entice many enterprises to evaluate and test drive it, even though few may eventually plunk down cash for the upgrade. The most significant of those elements is the suite"s support for Extensible Markup Language (XML), a de facto standard data format for Web services. By supporting XML, Microsoft is adding a whole new twist to Office, one that will eventually take the suite far from its original roots.