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Subject: Re: [office] custom schemas, metadata
On Jan 27, 2006, at 7:40 AM, Bruce D'Arcus wrote: > Just came across this last night from Microsoft's Brian Jones on > custom schemas in Office: > > <http://blogs.msdn.com/brian_jones/archive/2006/01/25/517739.aspx> > > What's interesting about his example is that it is actually all about > (mostly custom) metadata. Just a quick followup: See Brian's subsequent comments in the above blog entry. In particular: > The value of the additional structure often relates to the value of > the document itself. This isn't a scenario where you as an end user > would want to do it so that you could search through your files > easier. It's a scenario where your company would want to set up > templates so they could manage hundreds of thousands of documents. The > approach people have taken up until now is to use meta-data; but that > isn't tied directly to the content, so you have to force the user to > take an additional step of filling out the meta-data. Pushing data > back into the document for document generation scenarios is also a lot > easier with the custom XML support. He's totally right about the bigger picture, and also wrong; in particular that one has to choose one or the other (content vs. metadata). ... and: > ... It's important to note though that our goals with the custom > schema support was not to turn Word into an XML editor like XMetal. > Instead we wanted to bring structure to existing Word scenarios. We've > seen a large number of customer solutions where they were using things > like styles and bookmarks to imply semantics to certain portions of > their documents, and we wanted to make that easier and more robust. > You can work with any schema you want in Word, but you'll find that > the more complex the schema is, the harder it will be to work with (as > you probably expected). > > -Brian He's pretty much laying out the market/use case opportunities here, and echoing in part our discussion. One way to understand the possibilities, then, is this: we have the opportunity here to provide a superior alternative to MS custom schema support! It would be a different, in some ways more simple and elegant, solution to the same problem. Bruce
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