Today, most organizations have a wealth of Office documents that contain critical information, but finding, extracting, and reusing that information programmatically remains a largely unrealized goal. Fortunately, that's changing as XML processing in Microsoft Office 2003 grows up.
by Vishnu Prasad
October 20, 2004
uplication of effort in gathering information is an increasingly familiar scenario in many companies today. For example, an employee complains, "I've already submitted my expense report to finance, and now you want me to re-enter it in this intranet portal app?" In this scenario the employee must enter expense information for approval from his/her manager and also file another separate expense report for settlement via finance because many finance departments use financial software packages that aren't integrated with the company's intranet portal. Such isolated duplicative systems give rise to the concept of "scattered data islands," many of which are never repurposed.
You may dismiss this case as a simple integration problem, but consider how many times you've come across similar situations. For example, you may have submitted a well-documented list of components created in your previous projects to the company's intranet knowledge base portal. Your current project could reuse one of those components, but querying the document management system/portal may not find your previous documentation. Even if it does, you may need to perform a manual search to find the required information within the document. These conditions arise because the products used for development lack an integrated solution framework. Microsoft SharePoint portals addressed some of these issues, but the biggest issue is that companies have lacked a means to create intelligent repurposable documents.
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uplication of effort in gathering information is an increasingly familiar scenario in many companies today. For example, an employee complains, "I've already submitted my expense report to finance, and now you want me to re-enter it in this intranet portal app?" In this scenario the employee must enter expense information for approval from his/her manager and also file another separate expense report for settlement via finance because many finance departments use financial software packages that aren't integrated with the company's intranet portal. Such isolated duplicative systems give rise to the concept of "scattered data islands," many of which are never repurposed.
