The schema used by Visio 2003 to save drawings in XML format will be available royalty-free from Microsoft’s Web site. This continues an initiative begun in Nov. 2003, when Microsoft published the default XML schemas for Word, Excel, and InfoPath. Publishing these schemas helps customers and third parties build tools that can read and understand documents created with Office 2003. A corporate developer or solution provider, for example, could create tools that translate network diagrams to purchase orders and bills of materials by understanding Visio’s XML schema. In addition to helping other applications read existing documents, publishing the schema also allows Office documents to be generated from back-end systems. A human resources system, for example, could automatically generate a Visio diagram representing an organization chart by building an XML document that follows the published Visio schema.

For more information on licensing the Office XML schemas, see www.microsoft.com/office/xml.