"The more Microsoft can get companies to integrate Office technology into the fabric of their businesses, the less of a commodity Office becomes and the harder it is for companies to replace it with something like OpenOffice.org," said Gartner analyst Michael Silver.
The company had hoped to have the tool ready to offer broadly to customers by the end of last year but found there's still a lot of custom work that's needed for each company that wants to tie Outlook to its business software.
"We basically got to probably about 30 partners and said 'Hold on, we can't scale this yet' " Fitzgerald said. "We need to go take these internal bits and package it in a way that it is a solution that anybody can use. We're not there yet. We'll get there later this year."
The big picture
Microsoft doesn't look to be stopping with Elixir as it seeks to broaden Office's realm. With Office 12 -- the next major version of the software, due later this year or early in 2006 -- Microsoft is expected to increase the focus on server software that ties directly to Office.
It's part of a broad effort by the company to position Office as not just a set of individual programs but rather as a platform itself, onto which further development is possible. The company will tout a variety of such approaches at a conference next month for Office developers -- the first such conference to focus on the overall Office system rather than on creating add-ons for individual programs.
Microsoft is hoping the omnipresence of Office -- which is the overwhelming leader in the desktop software market -- will help popularise its other software. The company's Business Solutions unit sells CRM and other software to small and midsize companies. So far, however, the unit contributes only a small portion of Microsoft's overall revenue.
The idea of creating programs that make Office more than just a collection of desktop applications is not a new one. Microsoft has been pursuing such a strategy for a few years, Silver said.
Among its first efforts was trying to make Excel 2002 a tool that could be used to analyze a broad array of company data using XML.
"We saw the beginnings with XML in Excel 2002, but it really came through with the release of Office System 2003," Silver said.
In Office 2003 Microsoft added the program InfoPath, which uses XML to shuttle documents throughout different parts of a company's business processes, moving the data among different software programs as well.
InfoPath made it possible to do things like Elixir, but it also requires companies to do a lot of investment on their own to link Office with their business processes. With Elixir, Microsoft aims to offer tools that make it far easier.
There is still likely to be custom work for each company that wants to use Elixir. In most cases, Microsoft said that work will be handled by companies other than Microsoft.
"We would use partners," Fitzgerald said. "The same way we do consulting today -- We'll do 1 in 1,000 [installations], and the other 999 will be through partners."
