Microsoft gives away Office 2003 XML schemas

In a move to please the European Commission and governments globally, Microsoft has promised to make its Office 2003 XML reference schemas available royalty-free early December.

The decision follows Microsoft's discussions with the Danish government and three days of antitrust hearings last week.  As a result, Linux, Unix and Windows developers will get access to word processing, spreadsheet and form template XML schemas for several Office 2003 applications, including Word 2003, Excel 2003 and InfoPath 2003.

Denmark's government is the first customer taking advantage of the royalty-free license and will use the XML schemas to enhance interoperability of documents exchanged across public agencies.

Microsoft claims the decision to hand over the schemas and documentation globally from December 5 will ease industry fears about the Office 2003 interoperability afforded by XML.

Some say XML is designed to be a standard but that XML reference schemas for Office applications are proprietary APIs locking ISVs--and StarOffice documents--out of some

functionality.

Making the schemas available royalty-free may enable third-party software companies-- such as Red Hat, Novell, Sun Microsystems and others backing OpenOffice.org and

StarOffice--to build products that seamlessly interoperate with Office 2003, Microsoft claims.

One analyst said the move will please the European Commission, which is expected to rule on its antitrust case against Microsoft early 2004, and doesn't cost Microsoft much since open-source ISVs and office suite StarOffice have already provided basic interoperability with Office.

'Most governments around the world are mandating open standards for interoperability and Europe is at the vanguard. The EU would potentially have looked on Microsoft's new Office System unfavourably if Microsoft didn't make these commitments because of its tying of Office apps to back-end server systems,' said James Governor, a principal analyst with RedMonk, a US market research and consulting firm.

 'In light of this announcement with the Danish government, that is now less of an issue. This announcement will also serve to level the playing field for the likes of Sun and SUSE in competing with Microsoft.'

Having the documentation and schemas in hand should make the exchange between StarOffice and Office documents easier, analysts said. Microsoft Office holds roughly 95 percent market share worldwide.

The deal is viewed as a Microsoft concession to, and public acknowledgment of, alternative office suites in the marketplace.

Yet some ISVs will wait and see before applauding a new open world.

'On the face of it, it sounds great and that's why XML is so wicked-cool (sic),' said Jeremy Allison, a developer on Samba, a US open-source project whose file-serving software allows Linux and UNIX servers to replace Microsoft Windows NT Domain Controllers.

 'I'm very sceptical of (sic) Microsoft actually giving up their lock-out on file formats. I would suspect that they might make the schema open, but then make sure that a given XML file could only ever be usefully opened by a Microsoft product.'