1.3. Enterprise data integration We have seen that XML in Office can help integrate data by making it easier to share, search and process. This data sharing goes beyond making data in Office documents available to the enterprise. XML also makes it easier to import enterprise data into Office documents for reuse and analysis, and even to use Office as a front-end to manage enterprise data. 1.3.1 Importing enterprise data You know the data – that valuable information about sales, customers, products, inventory, and employees. It is stored in database management systems, software packages (such as ERP and accounting packages) and files on a variety of computer platforms around the organization. If you are lucky, you can at least access this data in useful ways using a reporting tool or custom application provided by your IT department. If you are not so lucky, you get canned reports that aren't exactly what you need and cannot be reused. Even worse, you have to get an IT person involved every time you want to query the data in a new way. That is all changing. Enterprise data is rapidly becoming available as XML. All major relational database vendors now offer an XML front-end, which allows data to be queried and extracted as XML. A lot of information that is stored and managed by ERP and other software packages can be exported as XML. In addition, there is a whole body of data whose native format is XML: both in XML databases and as documents in repositories and file systems. 1.3.2 Reusing enterprise data Remember Doug? He includes the past month's sales figures in his article for the newsletter. Before XML he went to an intranet site and ran a report that returned the results in a Web page. He then cut and pasted the information into his article in Word. He had to do some reformatting, because the data came back without dollar signs and the columns did not line up properly when pasted into Word. In addition, there were some figures, such as total sales and average amount of sale, which he calculated by hand. For Doug to do this once, with relatively static data, would not be a huge amount of extra work. But Doug includes some or all of the sales figures in his article every month. He had to go through this same cutting, pasting and reformatting process repeatedly. This was tedious, and prone to error. In addition, the data is updated regularly. In order to have the most up-to-date numbers in the article, he needed to wait until the last minute or redo the formatting again before publication. Office 2003 has greatly improved this situation using XML. All Doug needs to do now is click a button in the Word document to import the sales figures, formatted the way he wants them. When he wants to refresh the data, it is as simple as clicking that button again. Of course, there is some setup required. A link to the database that stores the sales data needs to be created to generate an XML document. Also, a mapping needs to be defined between the resulting XML and its formatting in Word. For repetitive tasks like this one, it is well worth the time spent for setup. 1.3.3 Analyzing enterprise data Another reason to import enterprise data is to allow the use of the familiar Office environment for data analysis and reporting. In particular, Excel has tools for performing complex, multi-step mathematical calculations on data, and for easily creating graphs and charts. Users are already familiar with Excel's features and want to continue to use them rather than learn new reporting tools for different kinds of enterprise data. Before XML, program code had to be written before Excel could import anything but text files that contained tabular data (flat files). And those had to be reformatted, just like Doug's sales figures. Importing XML does not require program code. Moreover, it allows Excel to import from a large number of possible data sources, without users having to understand the technical details of those sources. The enterprise data is imported into areas of Excel worksheets that were previously set up to analyze that kind of data. For example, Doug could create a spreadsheet to generate graphs of the sales figures, as well as summary statistics. He could import the latest sales figures with a single click each month, and the graphs and statistics would automatically be updated. 1.3.4 Office as an enterprise data front-end One of the exciting new capabilities of Office is not just reading enterprise data, but also acting as a front-end to create and update it. You can use Word, Excel and the new forms tool, InfoPath, for this purpose. With them you can create new business documents and data that you can store in a database or feed automatically to non-Office applications. For example, Ellen works in the accounting department of Worldwide Widget Corporation. The company uses an accounting package that allows the import of transactions from XML documents. Employees used to fill out their monthly expense reports in Excel and email them to Ellen. Ellen checked the expense reports and entered the totals manually into the accounting package in order to issue reimbursement checks. This worked out fine when there were only 15 traveling employees, but as the company grew, the task became unmanageable. There was the problem of invalid expense reports; employees often entered invalid dates or cost center codes. There was also the extra work of entering information into the accounting system, a process that was time consuming and subject to human error. In addition, there was very little querying and reporting capability. Ellen considered purchasing a Web-based expense reporting tool that employees could use when they are on the road. Instead, when XML in Office became available she realized that the employees could use it to create expense reports. She identified the cells in the Excel expense report as elements in the XML vocabulary required by the accounting package, created a set of validation rules, and rolled it out to the employees. Expense reports are now submitted as XML documents, although the employees continue to create them with the same tag-less Excel spreadsheet. Not only can Ellen validate and query these new expense reports far more easily, she can automatically import them into the accounting system. In situations like this one, Microsoft Office has huge potential as a simple, inexpensive XML editing tool. It requires no additional software for the users. The minimal amount of setup needed does not require advanced programming skills. | 
