A Practical Approach to XML Based Messaging
ABSTRACT
This session describes the benefits of migrating to an XML based messaging framework and a practical approach for doing so. Scenarios from commercial domains for capturing day-to-day messages into knowledge base and military applications are presented.
Human messaging is one of most common tasks performed in organizations today. It is used in a wide variety of activities from simple day-to-day communications to technical support and automated workflow implementations. It is well recognized that messages contain a lot of critical and useful information in them. This information is practically lost to the organization as it resides on the workstations (or mailboxes) of the communicators. Plain text, RTF and HTML have been the common formats used for creating and presenting messages in the past. Given the current trend of widespread adoption of XML, the benefits of moving to an XML based framework for messaging are significant for organizations. At the very least, this move could make the information more "intelligent" for potential future uses. In this paper, we present a practical approach towards moving to an XML based framework for organizational messaging.
The approach described here is based on an option available in Microsoft Outlook that allows Word to be used as the email editor. The use of Word as the email editor allows any plug-ins, such as WorX for Word and others to be used on messages. The message prepared in this manner is converted to XML using the plug-in. The use of Word in Outlook automatically delivers the message to external recipients in RTF, preserving the intended formatting of the message creator. The real benefits are, however, in routing the message to internal documentation editor or directly to the Knowledge Base. Such routing is performed using Outlook macros and is transparent to the user.
We argue that such an approach has the potential of moving organizations towards XML without having to wait for industry standard schemas to be available. While informal messaging between organizations will continue as text messages, more formal messages between trading partners can be structured as XML. Such an approach has the benefit of communicating information to humans while enabling automated processing on it at the same time. We will present scenarios from commercial domains for capturing day-to-day messages into knowledge base and military applications that can benefit from such a move.