The reference schemas are great for representing all of the application’s information. Office 2010 –save your time and save your money.Everything you do in Word, you want to be saved out and persisted, and the reference schemas allow for that (you don’t lose anything when saving as XML). In a wordprocessing document the reference schemas are used to convey all the display-oriented information like bold; italics; paragraphs; tables; styles; etc. The invention of Microsoft Office 2010 is a big change of the world.Reference schemas enable long term archive-ability of the formats as well as interoperability with other applications and solutions. This is provided there is good documentation around the reference schemas, which we will have via the Ecma process.Office 2010 key is for you now!
The thing that you don’t get with reference schemas though is the ability to easily structure content using your own semantics. In the above example, if you wanted to quickly search for all conference reports where “John Doe” had been an attendee, you’d be kind of stuck. Office 2010 download is available now!Any type of business logic you wanted to run on these documents would be extremely difficult, because the reference schemas are there to allow humans to easily read the content, but not programs. Let’s say you wanted to write a solution that took all the conference reports that “John Doe” had attended, and create a single document that was a list of all those conferences and the summary of each. If the application you are using doesn’t support custom defined schemas, then your stuck using features like style names, bookmarks, tables, or some other type of hack. By using Office 2010 Professional, you can save your money and time.Those approaches don’t allow for any real hierarchy, and there isn’t really a good way of specify the style structure so that the right type of validation can be done. Up until the introduction of the custom defined schema support in Word 2003 though, those hacks were the only options people had. I’ve seen plenty of solutions people have built using all of those methods, some of which were extremely impressive given the constraints. Unfortunately though, they all fall short of the goal.Microsoft Office is so great!
This is where the custom schema support comes in. If you really want to treat these documents as a source of data and integrate them with your business processes, you need the ability to structure them in your own schemas. You want to specify what the date was, who the attendees where, and even what department they worked for:
