Microsoft Adds XPS To Office 12 To Fight Adobe

XPS (XML Paper Specification), which has been codenamed "Metro," is Microsoft's answer to Adobe's PDF: an electronic document format that can be printed without needing the actual application which created it.

Office 12 applications -- Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Access, Publisher, Visio, OneNote, and InfoPath -- will include a Save As XPS option, said Jeff Bell, a program manager on the Office development team, in a blog written late Thursday.

"This Office feature provides a one-way export from Office client applications to an application- and platform-independent, paginated format," wrote Bell. To view, and print, an XPS document, users will need a viewer utility, which Microsoft itself will produce for Windows Vista and an unknown number of earlier editions of the Windows OS. "Directly or through partners, [viewers will be produced] for a range of other platforms," added Bell.

This is the second Office format announcement this month. Four weeks ago, Microsoft said Office 12 will have a Save As PDF feature.

"We think choice is a good thing," said Bell.

XPS shares several characteristics with PDF, including support for working hyperlinks, searching, transparencies and gradients, and document rights management. The latter, said Andy Simonds, the group program manager for the Windows Digital Documents Team, is something that should strike a chord with Office users.

"What I think will resonate the most with customers is the ability to roll-out Windows Rights Management Services and use the same infrastructure to rights-manage Office files as well as XPS files," Simonds blogged Friday.

Microsoft's opened the XPS format and has provided APIs so that other developers can create applications that work with the document format, but it also plans to make it a centerpiece of Windows Vista.

"This is bigger than just Office," said Joe Wilcox, an analyst with JupiterResearch.

"Microsoft's treating Adobe as a competitor much more so than in the past," he added. "Look how the deck is stacked: XPS/Metro, Expression, and Windows Workflow Foundation. It's releasing product after product that competes with Adobe."

So it goes with XPS, Wilcox argued. "It made sense for Microsoft to announce [PDF support in Office], because now it's in a position to show the advantages of its own technology against PDF. Microsoft can makes its technology look a lot better, and unlike the basic PDF capabilities it will give Office, fully support its own technology."

For example, Microsoft could support editing of XPS documents within Office 12 applications to make it possible for round-trip document journeys. The developer, however, has not announced such plans.

But it may.

"Watch this space," said Bell in his blog.