Most corporate workers already spend their days using Microsoft Office. The company’s goal now is to get more servers to follow suit. With an already commanding share of the desktop market, Microsoft these days is trying to transform Office into a tool that is deeply tied to a company’s core business processes. In Microsoft’s ideal world, Office serves as the friendly, familiar interface for the massive databases that hold a company’s customer and other information.
The first step in the effort was building XML tools into Office 2003 that let companies easily move data in and out of Excel, Word and PowerPoint. But for the effort really to take root, Microsoft needs developers to buy into the idea and create applications that build on Office.

