Office XML Smart Clients

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A smart new way to connect people to information

Microsoft Office 2007 and the industry standards around XML and web services are revolutionizing how enterprises connect people with information. We develop solutions that enable your workers to use common business documents to interface with your business systems, giving you improved worker productivity, reduced training, and streamlined workflow.

What is an Office XML smart client?

Smart clients are easily deployed and managed client applications that provide adaptive, responsive, and rich interactive experiences by leveraging your local PC resources and intelligently connecting to distributed data sources.

Unlike browser-based thin client applications, smart clients solutions do not depend on a connection to your server for processing; rather, most application logic and processing occurs on the local client machine using rich functionality. Compared to rich client solutions, smart clients are easier to deploy and update. Read more about smart client technology.

Utilize your Microsoft Office system

Office XML smart client solutions enable you to use Microsoft Office applications such as Word, Excel, and InfoPath as a front-end to your corporate data. The Microsoft Office system provides you with powerful data analysis, collaboration, reporting, and presentation features to turn data exposed by XML web services into information and business opportunities.

Microsoft Office provides built-in tools and full support for XML, so you can rapidly develop smart client applications. You can create smart client solutions that become integral components in your organization's information infrastructure, reflecting their own business logic and processing data through the use of XML web services. By using XML to separate data from other aspects of a document, presentation, or spreadsheet, your information workers can create data that can be reused by any other applications that support XML.

Smart clients can tap the power of modern computing hardware, work online or offline, and access enterprise information in a standard way using web services and XML.

Your business and technology benefits

Office smart clients deliver an impressive combination of power and flexibility for your business. Web services on the desktop can help streamline your operations, reduce time to market, and reduce demands on your IT department, while providing your users with a range of computing options for fast access to information.

Office smart client solutions also provide more and better options for connecting to information, which means your users and your organization can respond to rapidly changing business needs.

We develop Office XML smart client solutions that deliver benefits for your company:

  • lower training costs and increased productivity — your information workers can access enterprise data
  • increased productivity — documents your workers create and generate contain accurate information
  • more efficient and error-free information gathering processes
  • ability to share and repurpose documents electronically — increases interoperability across enterprise boundaries
  • ability to make quicker and more informed business decisions — you're able to visualize data immediately and leverage the capabilities of the local client for analysis

Four ways smart clients can help

1. Business process management

Do you rely on paper forms for managing critical business processes and workflow? Do your workers fill out forms by hand, manually route them to reviewers and approvers, and then type them into proprietary applications?

Instead of having to fill out paperwork, you can use an InfoPath form (an XML forms technology bundled with Microsoft Office Professional Enterprise Edition 2007) to collect data, which also saves time and reduces potential data entry errors. You can submit InfoPath documents to XML web services that kick off electronic workflow processes. The results are easy-to-use business forms, reduced process times, and greater accuracy. Read more about business process management.

2. Document authoring and publishing

Do you face the challenge of authoring documents for publication in multiple formats, such as print, web, and PDA? Are you looking for a cost-effective way to distribute materials online while providing rich, contextual navigation to your end users?

Using Microsoft Office Word 2007 or InfoPath 2007, you can develop well-integrated XML content-authoring and editing tools to produce material that you can simultaneously distribute in print and online. Editors can mark up Word documents using XML tags that describe structure and content, not formatting, so they can focus on creating better content. Office XML smart client solutions also enable users to quickly access information in back-office systems, databases, and other data repositories to import information directly into the XML documents. Read more about single source publishing solutions.

3. Business analytics

Do you use Microsoft Excel extensively to model and analyze your business data? Does your process for inputting data take hours or days?

Using the XML capabilities of Microsoft Office 2007, data automatically extracted from line of business systems as an XML file can populate an Office Excel 2007 workbook and present information schematically. This allows your information workers to focus on analysis instead of data entry, reduces the production time of meaningful analyses, and enables you to be more responsive to change.

4. Empowering the mobile field

Do your business users depend on information even though they're only occasionally connected to your corporate network? Are there situations where your employees are not guaranteed reliable network access?

For remote workers, such as your mobile sales force, repairmen, or technicians, smart clients and mobile devices help increase productivity. Your remote workers can access critical data on your company systems, bring the data offline and to the remote location, and synchronize and make updates or modifications to that data when they regain connectivity.