Big news on Office 12

At every opportunity I complained to my contacts at Microsoft about the fact that restricting full Office 2003 XML support to Office 2003 Pro was a big mistake,  and would not stimulate Office Pro sales,  instead it would slow the adoption of the suite and the use of XML in general.  So I was very pleased to see the following, on Brian’s blog:

I haven’t seen much mention of this yet so I wanted to call it out in case folks weren’t aware yet. For Office “12”, all of the XML functionality will be enabled in all SKUs. In Office 2003, the XML file formats were enabled in all versions, but the support for customer defined schemas was only in the Pro-SKU and not in the standard SKU.

Now lets hope Microsoft see sense about InfoPath as well.