The push 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 5 December, 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 organisational 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 customised 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.

"I think it became a question of concern among the customers that the XML support was there, but if you didn't have the schemas, that was kind of limiting," Gartenberg said. "The real question is why they didn't take this approach in the first place. I think they just didn't really anticipate this kind of reaction."

Alan Yates, senior director of business strategy for Microsoft, said the XML decision was largely based on customer feedback. Office 2003 is a complex product, he said, and it took some time to realise how useful schema access could be to customers and partners.

"We went through a long beta period...and it's just now that we're documenting and publishing the results of all that feedback," he said. "After the product ships, you start to peel the onion back on various solutions customers are trying to build with it."