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February 21, 2003

Ten things to know about XDocs

Jon Udell has an InfoWorld article and a blog entry talking about XDocs InfoPath, with "10 things you should know about this revolutionary piece of software".

My take from reading about this app:

  1. It'll surely be a Release 1.0 product. R1 products don't change business overnight, but they do change the landscape when they're interesting enough.
  2. "Semi-structured" doesn't mean "a little structure and a lot of blobs"; XML is deeper than that. In a desktop tool, this means: centrally-managed schema, with decentralized data gathering...
  3. When did you ever hear the words "aggressively standards-based" about something from Redmond? But this is. Finally MS's huge investment in XML tooling - parsers, schema - begins to show fruit.

(Jon's blog entry has something new, too: audio clips from his interviews. Wow!)