Business Process Automation for the
Enterprise
White Paper
Published: September 2003
For the latest information, please see http://www.microsoft.com/
Contents
Introduction ..............................................................................................................................1
Executive Summary ................................................................................................................2
Microsoft’s Vision of Business Process Automation and Collaboration ........................3
Empowering Information Workers...................................................................................3
Use of XML Throughout the Platform ..............................................................................4
Intelligent Applications ......................................................................................................4
Connecting People to Data................................................................................................4
An Integrated Platform for End-to-End Solutions ........................................................5
Microsoft Platform for Business Process Automation .......................................................6
Architecture ..........................................................................................................................6
Enabling Technologies ............................................................................................................9
Support for XML in the Microsoft Office System Programs ........................................9
Microsoft Office InfoPath 2003 .........................................................................................9
Microsoft BizTalk Server 2004 .......................................................................................10
Microsoft Office SharePoint Portal Server 2003 .........................................................10
Microsoft Office Visio® 2003 ..........................................................................................11
Windows Server 2003 Operating System Services ...................................................11
Developer Tools .................................................................................................................12
Solution Accelerators and Microsoft Partners .............................................................14
Business Scenarios ...............................................................................................................15
Response to Request for Proposal (RFP)......................................................................15
Insurance Claims Processing ..........................................................................................16
Purchase Order Routing ...................................................................................................17
Conclusion...............................................................................................................................19
Introduction
Since the dawn of civilization, information was captured in some kind of “document” form,
whether written on stone tablets or vellum scrolls or, later, printed on paper. These early
documents represented people’s first efforts at managing unstructured data. People have
always used business documents to engage in transactions. Today’s businesses create,
capture, and manage information in myriad forms: as structured data in operational systems,
as documents that are published and shared, and in countless e-mail messages.
In recent decades, we have established methods for storing and managing structured
information, for example, numerical data in databases or financial records and statistics;
however, a significant portion of the information created in the business environment has
remained unstructured and, as a result, has not been captured in any meaningful way.
Microsoft solutions for Business Process Automation help organizations manage their
document-based information as effectively as they do their numerical, tabular, and operational
data. The convergence of these two models—the capability to manage structured and
unstructured data in an integrated fashion—represents a new paradigm.
This paradigm shift will be epitomized by a revolution in business processes, blurring the lines
between unstructured business documents and the transactional enterprise data stores;
integrating the collaborative processes that draw on the collective knowledge of the
organization; and enabling companies to aggregate, parse, search, manage, and reuse
documents and domain knowledge in the same way they do their business data.
If you can’t integrate your business processes, you cannot respond well to changing business
conditions. Too often companies are tied down to custom-built, inflexible systems that can’t
adapt to changing business needs. Critical data is locked away in proprietary, stand-alone
systems and line-of-business financial, manufacturing, or human resources applications. The
recent introduction of important technologies, including workflow engines and Web services,
has solved some of the problems associated with integration and automation. But
organizations still face the daunting challenge of heterogeneous platforms, multiple systems,
and front-end applications that don’t integrate well with back-end systems.
Only in recent years has the marketplace introduced products that put the power to automate
a business process—simple or complex—in the hands of the information worker. Many
believe that the effects of empowering information workers to define and implement process
automation will be as significant to business as the impact of the word processor or the
spreadsheet.
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Executive Summary
Facing dramatic changes in the business world, organizations are finding it essential but
difficult to manage business processes end to end. Tied down to custom-built, inflexible
systems that often can’t adapt to changing business needs, companies find they need new
strategies, structures and operational practices to manage change, and create and sustain
advantage. Businesses need not only to make faster, more informed decisions, but also to
manage the flow of information—by inexpensively connecting applications, people, partners,
and data. Achieving efficient process automation requires companies to approach system
integration and business process automation with a planned, systematic approach. The
Microsoft Platform for Business Process Automation provides a complete platform for end-toend processes, solving problems common to many organizations today:

Efficiency. Streamlining and automating repetitive processes allows people to work
more efficiently, increasing productivity enterprise-wide.

Time-to-market. Eliminating manual steps and information handling reduces response
times and speeds the delivery of both goods and services.

Quality of service. Deploying processes around best practices ensures quality and
consistency in products and customer service.

Access to information. Integrating the desktop applications with line-of-business and
back-office applications and enterprise data silos allows people to work more
effectively.

IT costs. Empowering information workers to define their own processes reduces the
need for IT departments to be involved with lines of business on a daily basis. Further,
reliance on industry standards, such as Extensible Markup Language (XML), reduces
costly point-to-point integration and eliminates many of the costs associated with
creating and maintaining custom solutions.

Leveraging existing investment in software and systems. By building business process
solutions on the Microsoft Windows® platform and the Microsoft Office System, and by
integrating their line-of-business and back-office applications that are already in place,
organizations increase the value of their investment in these systems and avoid the
cost of replacing software.
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Microsoft’s Vision of Business Process Automation
and Collaboration
Microsoft’s vision of business process automation is a vision of end-to-end processes, which
empower information workers not only to initiate and execute processes that extend from the
desktop to enterprise data silos, but also to define and create these processes from their
desktops in a simple, straightforward manner.
The key to this vision is a complete, integrated platform for enterprise technologies, including
world-class desktop productivity applications, seamless integration with Microsoft enterprise
servers, and interoperability with heterogeneous platforms, as well as support for XML and
other industry standard and Internet technologies.
Empowering Information Workers
With the Microsoft Office System installed on 300 million desktops worldwide, Microsoft
products play an instrumental role in the creation and flow of information throughout many
major organizations. The Microsoft Office System programs, servers, and services empower
information workers by connecting the desktop environment to enterprise data, by providing
tools that enable sophisticated analysis and reporting, and by improving on the applications
and programs to make workers more productive.
With the release of the Microsoft Office System, Windows ServerTM 2003, and a host of new
server products, Microsoft is empowering information workers further by enabling them to
engage in business processes from within the Office applications, and to create both ad hoc
and permanent business processes from within Microsoft Office System programs. These
solutions increase productivity by eliminating daily and repetitive information handling.
This empowerment enables organizations to capture business process knowledge at the
source: the information workers who define and execute these processes on a daily basis.
Further, it reduces the burden on IT to create, deploy, and maintain custom or one-off
solutions for specific workflow or process flows.
Microsoft automates the business process in two ways: by focusing on information-centric or
document-centric processes and by providing the familiar business productivity applications
that drive these processes.
Document-Based Processes
At the heart of every enterprise are numerous document-driven business processes that
determine how information is to be collected, reported, published, shared, and stored.
Document-based processes, including financial reporting, proposal management, contract
management, recruiting and other business activities, influence the ways organizations
collaborate on work; how they communicate with partners, customers, and shareholders; and
how they store or archive information for reuse and retrieval.
The Microsoft Office System represents the world’s leading system for creation of business
documents, including forms, reports, spreadsheets, e-mail messages, presentations, and Web
pages. Integrated collaboration features and document management functionality ensure that
organizations can create documents efficiently, and can also share, reuse, search, protect,
and manage effectively the information that these documents contain.
Familiar Business Productivity Applications
The Microsoft Office System includes numerous features that enable information workers to
initiate processes from within the applications—for example, routing an expense report to
review from within Microsoft Office InfoPathTM 2003, or publishing analytical results to an
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intranet portal from within Microsoft Office Excel 2003. Building process automation around
familiar applications reduces the learning curve and helps ensure that processes will be
adopted quickly and easily by the people who use them.
In particular, an overwhelming number of business processes rely on the use of forms to
capture data and initiate the required actions. Through InfoPath 2003, the Microsoft Office
System provides an intuitive forms-based interface that enables organizations to create rich
applications based on their own forms. Forms are driven by customer-defined XML schemas,
which allow the organization to define the structure and type of data that each data element in
a document can contain. XML schemas can be created by a user, a company, or at the
industry level, and are the key to automating document- and forms-based processes.
Use of XML Throughout the Platform
A public and widely accepted standard, XML enables exchange of data between disparate
systems. For many companies, XML facilitates enterprise transactions and business-tobusiness data exchange, solving issues of cross-platform compatibility. Many companies have
adopted also the XML Web services architecture as a way to expose data in back-end
systems and to leverage the existing infrastructure for XML-based solutions. But although
many businesses rely on XML for data exchange and transaction processing, and even
though the necessary servers and architecture are in place on the Internet and at the
enterprise level, XML has not yet been fully exploited on the desktop.
The Microsoft Office System enables rich solutions by bringing the power of XML to the
desktop. Having this power on the desktop opens the door to a new generation of Officebased solutions, in which XML plays a critical role in empowering information workers and
enabling companies to automate fully the processes that drive their business.
Intelligent Applications
XML offers exceptional potential for automating virtually any task that involves working with
documents. Creating documents such as reports, spreadsheets, and forms with an attendant
XML schema—even if that schema is hidden to the information worker—enables developers
to build solutions that recognize the structure and meaning of the content within those
documents and respond intelligently to the information worker. Application intelligence can be
used also to validate information or data as it is input, avoiding errors and aiding in data
cleansing and normalization.
With the ability to define their own schemas, companies can identify the unique regions of
meaning within their documents and create solutions that correlate these structures to their
own business processes. Moreover, the ability to identify sections of a document structurally—
or to recognize specific content within a section—allows developers to create applications that
respond intelligently to information worker input, offering context-sensitive actions and
guidance, suggesting content, or providing supporting data or links to related information.
Connecting People to Data
XML Web services use open, Internet standards to allow communication between business
systems and data sources, exposing the information in these systems to a broad range of
applications—including programs written in different languages on different platforms. By
providing XML-enabled applications on the desktop, companies take advantage of this
infrastructure to empower employees, by enabling them to connect directly to enterprise
systems and back-office applications and data sources.
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The ability to connect the desktop environment to back-end systems, including line-ofbusiness and back-office applications and enterprise or operational data stores, allows
organizations to design seamless processes that begin or end with the information workers.
Using Office-based smart client applications and XML Web services, companies can
automate processes that access enterprise information directly and dynamically, and surface
that information where it’s needed: in the spreadsheet, word processor, or application that will
be used to analyze, format, or publish the information. Likewise, they can create processes
that begin on the desktop, capturing data input by the information worker in a form, document,
or e-mail message and initiating actions that eventually write this information to the appropriate
database or document repository.
An Integrated Platform for End-to-End Solutions
Enterprise customers benefit from seamless processes, solutions that automate every aspect
of a business process, from the creation of information through the consumption,
management, archival, tracking, and logging—and more. These solutions must allow
integration with other systems to enable the flexibility and scalability that today’s business
climate demands.
The strength of the Microsoft vision lies in the ability to seamlessly integrate the desktop
productivity applications—the client for the business process—with the business logic that
drives the process and the enterprise systems that house the business data. The result is a
business process framework that enables our partners and enterprise customers to develop
highly customized business process solutions that address the needs of specific vertical
industries or lines of business, while remaining highly flexible.
By providing business solutions that incorporate the Microsoft Office System, organizations
allow the information worker to engage in the entire business process from within the familiar
Microsoft Office System programs, without switching to the different interface of a line-ofbusiness or back-office application to perform certain actions related to the process.
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Microsoft Platform for Business Process Automation
Architecture
The Microsoft Business Process Automation architecture uses an n-tier approach, as shown in
Figure 1. This architecture takes advantage of the XML support in the Microsoft Office System
programs, together with Microsoft BizTalk® Server for workflow, and Web services for context
and tasks, to expose data from custom legacy applications and line-of-business systems to
the desktop in a business process-specific context, where information workers can act on this
information within the Microsoft Office System programs that they use every day for a majority
of their daily tasks.
The Microsoft Business Process Automation architecture.
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The following sections discuss each layer of the architecture in detail.
Front End: Microsoft Office InfoPath 2003 and the Microsoft Office System Programs
The Microsoft Office System programs enable automation through support for customerdefined XML schemas. Intelligent applications recognize the type of information an information
worker has selected based on the underlying XML elements, and allow the information worker
to select from a range of actions specific to this element. For example, a smart document
application could predetermine the level of review and approval required for a particular report
by detecting the content within the document itself; or a smart tag can recognize a product
number within a service request and prompt the customer service representative to initiate a
warranty claim.
The degree of automation within Microsoft Office documents and forms can range from simple
to complex, incorporating workflow and notification, and two-way interactions with back-end
data silos. Actions can be initiated manually by information workers, automatically, on
recognition of a term or type of data, or triggered by a user action, such as the “Save”
command. In short, the XML support in the Microsoft Office System programs offers a
tremendous opportunity to define intelligent information workflow and provide sophisticated
management capabilities for documents and document-based processes.
Core Server Components: Microsoft BizTalk Server 2004, Microsoft Office SharePointTM
Portal Server 2003, and Windows Server 2003 with Internet Information Services 6.0
At the heart of a Business Process Automation solution built on the Microsoft Windows®
operating system are Microsoft BizTalk Server, Microsoft Office SharePoint Portal Server
2003, and Windows Server 2003 with Internet Information Services (IIS) 6.0. These servers
act as hubs for workflow and document routing. Each includes a wide range of pre-built
connectors that enable the hubs to talk to enterprise or line-of-business systems (such as SAP
or Siebel), and each includes programming interfaces for custom integration and design of
workflow.

Microsoft Office SharePoint Portal Server 2003 provides an enterprise-class
document repository with built-in search and index functionality, as well as powerful
workflow capabilities. SharePoint Portal Server integrates with the Microsoft Office
System programs so that information workers can read, edit, collaborate on, and save
documents directly to the portal site from within these desktop applications.

BizTalk Server offers workflow logic and workflow actions, orchestrating the flow of
information through the enterprise. Through support for XML and a wide range of
connectors, BizTalk Server enables developers to design processes that integrate
with virtually any enterprise system. BizTalk Server also plays a key role in enabling
processes that extend to partners and customers, enabling organizations to exchange
data with other systems regardless of platform.

Windows Server 2003 with IIS 6.0 is a complete Web server available in all versions
of the Microsoft Windows Server 2003 operating system. Designed for intranets, the
Internet, and extranets, IIS 6.0 makes it possible for organizations of all sizes to
quickly and easily deploy powerful Web sites and applications. In addition, IIS 6.0
provides a high-performance platform for applications built using the Microsoft .NET
Framework.
Back End: Enterprise Servers and Data Silos
The back-end of the Microsoft Business Process Automation platform includes a wide range
of technologies and services, including line-of-business and back-office applications,
enterprise data stores, document portals and repositories, and directory and orchestration
services that ensure the processes integrate with the organization’s computing infrastructure.
Specifically:
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
Line-of-business and back-office applications may include custom programs, thirdparty software, and financial or business applications, such as Microsoft Business
Solutions—Great Plains® or Microsoft Business Solutions—Solomon, or Microsoft
CRM. These applications typically expose a set of actions through a specific,
proprietary interface. The interface itself may be exposed through Web services or
connectors to BizTalk Server or SharePoint Portal Server, which enable processes to
call the application’s APIs and exchange data as XML between custom legacy
applications and back office applications, such as SAP systems, mainframe-based
programs, Great Plains, third-party line-of-business software, and many others.

Business process solutions built on the Microsoft platform can leverage Windows
Server 2003 operating system services to ensure security and simplify administration.
Microsoft Active Directory® can be used to authenticate users through role-based
security and single sign on. Windows Digital Rights Management Server (DRM) can
provide authorization, policies, encryption, and tamper-resistance of documents.
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Enabling Technologies
Support for XML in the Microsoft Office System Programs
Enhanced XML support throughout the Microsoft Office System provides a tremendous
opportunity for businesses to define intelligent information workflow and provide sophisticated
management capabilities for documents and document-based processes.
Both Microsoft Office Word 2003 and Microsoft Office Excel 2003 include support for standard
or customer-defined XML schemas, as well as the ability to define and create schemas based
on the document structure. Because Word 2003 and Excel 2003 accept and render XML,
business documents can be created based on a schema, thus allowing automatic and
intelligent handling of documents according to tags and elements. The ability to write XML
allows Word and Excel documents to immediately participate in business processes. Microsoft
Office System smart documents use XML to automate document-based processes and
connect the desktop productivity environment to an organization’s line-of-business and backoffice systems.
Smart Documents
Support for customer-defined XML schemas allow the development of smart document
applications, programmed to recognize document content and present information workers
with context-sensitive guidance and choice of actions. Smart documents rely on the underlying
XML schema of Word document or Excel spreadsheet to present contextually relevant
information that assists information workers’ interaction with the document.
Smart documents play an important in streamlining the authoring process, and in automating
document-based business processes. As the information worker interacts with a document, a
smart document application can guide the person or provide menus of possible actions that
are part of the business process, based on the schema elements associated with specific
content.
Microsoft Office InfoPath 2003
InfoPath 2003 is a powerful front end to business processes. New with the Microsoft Office
System, InfoPath 2003 uses a forms metaphor to capture information according to a
customer-defined XML schema, enabling customers to gather and reuse information with
predefined structures and as part of a business process.
The InfoPath interface allows information workers to create and gather information easily on
top of the core XML model. InfoPath associates an XSL-T (Extensible Style Sheet Language–
Transformation) style sheet with the form interface, enabling information workers to view and
edit XML forms. InfoPath provides all the functionality expected from a forms package,
including the ability to structure and validate data, as well as the use of word processing—all
within the familiar Microsoft Office user interface.
InfoPath supports complex forms with hierarchical structures, free-form text, tables, optional or
repeated blocks, data validation, data aggregation, and forms with need of multiple views. In a
corporate environment, InfoPath streamlines data entry and data capture; native support for
XML enables companies to create InfoPath solutions that send data from the desktop
environment to back-end systems via XML Web services.
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Microsoft BizTalk Server 2004
A core enabling technology in business process automation and system integration, BizTalk
Server connects systems, people, and trading partners through manageable business
processes, removing the barriers that hinder enterprise productivity and agility. Building on the
Microsoft Windows Server System TM and the Microsoft .NET Framework, BizTalk Server
delivers an integrated, interoperable, modular, extensible, and secure e-business solution.
BizTalk Server integrates enterprise applications so businesses can automate business
processes and achieve a unified view of their data and applications—both within their
organization and with their business partners—to increase revenues and decrease operating
costs.
BizTalk Orchestration Designer and BizTalk Orchestration Engine help organizations with
automate business processes, enabling their businesses to run predictably. Data and
transformation services and the application integration features give businesses the unified
view they need to manage their business and remain agile. BizTalk Server makes it possible
to rapidly deploy and easily manage an integration solution. BizTalk Server enables
companies to integrate systems and automate processes in a number of ways:

Information workers can increase their productivity by making the most of the familiar
Microsoft Office tools they already know.

Information workers can monitor business activities, gaining a real-time view of running
business processes with the Microsoft Office tools they already know, such as Microsoft
Office Excel.

People can integrate with the processes because the human-based workflow in BizTalk
Server uses a single orchestration engine.

For information workers, referencing and building XML Web services for orchestration
becomes a simple process in the integrated development environment because of the
built-in support for XML Web services standards such as Web Services Description
Language (WSDL) and Universal Description, Discovery, and Integration (UDDI).

Information workers gain the ability to establish and dynamically change business rules
and processes, thereby maximizing organizational flexibility.

Information workers can construct massively scalable messaging and orchestration-based
applications through enhanced scale-out architecture.
Microsoft Office SharePoint Portal Server 2003
Microsoft Office SharePoint Portal Server 2003 enables enterprises to develop an intelligent
portal that seamlessly connects information workers, teams, and knowledge so that
information workers can harness enterprise information and resources across business
processes to work more efficiently and collaborate more easily, making better use of company
resources.
SharePoint Portal Server gives information workers a starting and ending place for business
processes by enabling a single point of access to multiple systems, such as Microsoft Office
System programs, business intelligence and project management systems, and existing lineof-business and back-office applications, including third-party and industry-specific programs.
Providing an enterprise-class document repository with built-in search and index functionality
as well as powerful workflow capabilities, SharePoint Portal Server integrates with the
Microsoft Office System programs, so people can read, edit, collaborate on, and save
documents directly to the portal site from within these desktop applications. Information
workers can find relevant information quickly through customization and personalization of
portal content and layout, as well as by audience targeting. Organizations can target
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information, programs, and updates to audiences based on people’s organizational role, team
membership, interest, security group, or any other membership criteria that can be defined.
The Microsoft Office System programs also include a new SharePoint Task Pane that
exposes the relevant document tasks, contacts, and other activities inside the office
application, bringing team collaboration context into the information worker’s personal
productivity tool. Documents can be synchronized naturally by the user with the document
workspace copy to enable each contributor to see the changes of others.
SharePoint Portal Server 2003 uses Microsoft Windows SharePoint Services 2003 sites to
create portal pages. The portal also extends the capabilities of Windows SharePoint Services
sites with organization and management tools, and enables teams to publish information in
their sites to the entire organization.
Microsoft Office Visio® 2003
Microsoft Office Visio 2003 enables information workers to define and create end-to-end
business processes from their desktops in a simple, straightforward manner. An intuitive
graphical interface provides a way to model these processes and communicate them visually.
With its support for XML, Visio 2003 gives information workers the capability to define the
structure behind the processes it illustrates and to bind the individual elements of a diagram or
flowchart to a back-end system containing information about those elements.
Visio 2003 includes specialized templates for business process modeling efforts, including
conceptual charts, decision trees, flow diagrams, process and procedural charts, and time and
activity charts. Because the information contained in a Visio 2003 diagram can generate XMLbased output files, Visio 2003 business process charts and diagrams can be exported to other
applications and systems, and serve to drive the creation and automation of business
processes. Ongoing work to develop broadly applicable business process and workflow
standards—including Business Process Execution Language for Web Services (BPEL4WS)
and Business Process Modeling Language (BPML)—will make it easier for organizations to
use Visio 2003 diagrams to coordinate business processes that span platforms. Visio 2003’s
support for XML Web services provides people with an easy-to-use graphical interface for
viewing real-time enterprise data or business activity performance metrics.
Windows Server 2003 Operating System Services
Business process solutions built on the Microsoft platform can leverage Windows Server 2003
operating system services to ensure security and simplify administration, in particular, the
following three services.
Active Directory
Active Directory can be used to authenticate users through role-based security and single sign
on. This simplified but complete authentication streamlines the development and
administration tasks associated with process automation by leveraging existing infrastructure
and services. Perhaps more importantly, it allows organizations to implement new business
processes in a manner consistent with established security policies and user roles.
Digital Rights Management
Windows DRM can provide authorization, policies, encryption, and tamper-resistance
capability for documents, all based on the needs of the business process. The Microsoft Office
System programs support DRM around specific content within documents, spreadsheets, and
e-mail messages. Thus, sensitive business processes, such as contracts, job offers, and
proposals can be made not only secure, but also tamper-proof. The DRM technology in the
Microsoft Office System enables information workers to protect a document with security
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based on a policy established for a particular business process and based on templates that
were created specifically for a specific process.
Windows SharePoint Services
Windows SharePoint Services allows teams to create Web sites for information sharing and
document collaboration, a capability that helps increase individual and team productivity.
Windows SharePoint Services is a component of the Windows Server 2003 information
worker infrastructure and provides team services and sites to Microsoft Office System and
other desktop programs, as well as serving as a platform for application development.
Windows SharePoint Services sites take file storage to a new level, providing communities for
team collaboration and making it easier for people to work together on documents, tasks,
contacts, events, and other information-gathering projects. In addition, team and site
managers can coordinate site content and user activity easily. The Windows SharePoint
Services environment has been designed for easy and flexible deployment, administration,
and application development.
Windows SharePoint Services adds versioning and check-in and check-out capabilities to its
document storage system, empowering workers to collaborate on business processes that are
document-centric, such as proposals or contracts.
Developer Tools
By bringing rich XML support to the desktop, the Microsoft Office System gives developers a
much greater palette of tools with which to control how documents and data intersect with
business processes. Extensive support for industry-standard XML enables easier connections
between the desktop and disparate computer systems, more intelligent applications that
understand the semantics of the data being used, and XML storage formats that can provide
more extended reuse of information.
The Microsoft Office System also includes both new and enhanced tools for developers and IT
professionals. These tools improve the productivity of solution developers and programmers,
enable new solution types, and simplify deployment and maintenance of these solutions to the
enterprise. Following are descriptions of specific development tools.

Task Pane: The Microsoft Office System programs include a programmable task pane
that developers can use to display relevant information or links to relevant information
within the application. Within a smart document, the task pane can streamline and
automate what may currently be lengthy day-to-day business processes by displaying
tasks and information relevant to a specific section within a document or spreadsheet
based on the XML elements of the document.
Typical uses of the programmable task pane include presenting supporting information,
such as data that corresponds to the document, relative help content, or calculation fields.
Developers can create smart document task panes that also integrate with line-ofbusiness and back-office systems and existing document repositories, allowing
information workers to access these data sources from within the document or
spreadsheet and eliminating the need for separate line-of-business and back-office client
software.

Smart Documents Software Developers Kit (SDK): Smart document applications
combine the richness of Office-based solutions with the "no touch" deployment and
management advantages of Web solutions. Smart document solutions can be deployed
from a trusted server for increased security and easier maintainability. They are
implemented through a Computer Object Model (COM) interface, or can be created using
.NET-connected managed code with a primary interop assembly (PIA). Smart documents
provide a framework for more secure applications while transforming documents into
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intelligent solutions. A Software Development Kit (SDK) is available to help developers
understand how to build, configure and deploy smart document solutions.

Smart Tags SDK: Smart tag developers will benefit from the new capabilities, which
support more sophisticated actions and more intelligent smart tags. Specifically,
extensible smart tag support is now available in Word and Excel, as well as Microsoft
Office Access 2003, Microsoft Office PowerPoint® 2003 and Microsoft Office Outlook®, in
addition to new features such as the Research Library and Shared Workspaces. Smart
tags integrate with XML support in Word 2003 and Excel 2003, and smart tag actions can
be linked to XML elements in documents or spreadsheets, for example, offering to prepopulate data or applying different transforms or views on XML data. Smart tags can be
configured also to automatically execute actions and to modify the document, an action
which opens new possibilities for automating document-based processes. The Smart
Tags SDK describes the new capabilities in detail and helps developers understand how
to build smart tags and how to use the new features.

Web Services Toolkit: Support for accessing Web services from the Office programs
has been enhanced as well. As in Office XP, developers can search and reference Web
services from a UDDI server or interface with a local Web service using the WSDL file for
that service. This toolkit can be downloaded from MSDN.

Visual Studio® Tools for Office: The new Visual Studio Tools for the Microsoft Office
System technology brings the power and productivity of Visual Studio .NET and the .NET
Framework to business solutions built on the next versions of Word and Excel. With this
technology, developers using Visual Studio .NET 2003 can use Microsoft Visual Basic®
.NET and Microsoft Visual C#® .NET to write code that executes behind Word and Excel
documents; previously they would only have been able to write VBA. “Code behind” .NETconnected projects can be started in Visual Studio .NET and applied to existing Excel
2003 spreadsheets or Word 2003 documents and templates. Developers get the full,
robust advantages of the Visual Studio .NET environment. Using managed code with
Office 2003 allows developers to create applications with a more robust security model,
restricting code that can execute only on a fully trusted corporate server. This .NET
environment also simplifies deployment, saving time and money by not requiring a manual
installation of code on each desktop.

InfoPath Solutions: InfoPath 2003 makes it easy for developers to create and deploy
rich, forms-based processes and implement solutions by providing developers with a facile
interface for constructing dynamic, interactive forms with built-in business validations and
business rules for accurate and efficient collection of information. InfoPath allows rapid
solution creation without complex data mapping by using existing customer-defined data
schemas, Web services, XML data, or by allowing creation from scratch. Built-in script
editor, rich object model and programmable task panes allow developers to build more
advanced solutions.
Forms can be connected to back-end systems and applications directly from the form,
using simple point-and-click functionality. InfoPath supports XML-based Web services and
database connections by way of Active Data Objects (ADO). Integration hooks with
Microsoft Windows SharePoint Services provide an easy way to build integrated
collaborative solutions, such as sharing reports and aggregation of information. Integration
with other Microsoft Office applications is easy, including built in e-mail integration with
Outlook and data export to Excel.
A Web-based model for deploying and updating solution detects version changes in the
process; forms will be upgraded automatically throughout the organization when someone
next opens the form.
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Solution Accelerators and Microsoft Partners
Microsoft has developed several solution offerings that automate common, high-value
business processes. These solution offerings, termed “solution accelerators” are integrated
sets of products, services, and Microsoft-authored guidance designed to solve specific
customer business problems.
Solution accelerators can be deployed and integrated by Microsoft-certified partners or
corporate developers familiar with solution development on the Microsoft platform. The
solution accelerators offer extremely rapid deployment and leverage the Microsoft Office
System, the Windows Server System, and the Windows operating system to minimize upfront
purchase and licensing costs for software and servers.
Some of current solution accelerators include:

The Microsoft Office Solution Accelerator for Proposals

Microsoft Solution Accelerator for Recruitment

Microsoft Solution Accelerator for Healthcare
For more information on the solution accelerators and Microsoft partners, visit
http://www.microsoft.com/business/
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Business Scenarios
The following sections describe some typical Business Process Automation scenarios.
Response to Request for Proposal (RFP)
Information workers create proposals from within the familiar Microsoft Office System
programs, complete with work assignments, tracking, and reuse of accumulated knowledge.
Problem
Almost every business creates proposals, whether as a response to an RFP or marketgenerating proposals such as financial “pitchbooks.” Because proposal-generation is a
common, but labor-intensive, task, businesses of all sizes stand to gain a great deal from
automating this process.
Creating a proposal is a tedious and repetitive process that typically involves research,
gathering together pieces of information from multiple documents and systems. Often, the
process involves several people who may work on various sections of the proposal, handing
them off to other reviewers at various stages of the research process. The proposal creation
process may involve many different applications and is not integrated. Tracking progress and
status is difficult. The information created and assembled during the proposal process often
has value beyond the completed proposal, but because the information has been “locked” in a
static document, this information is typically difficult to search and reuse.
Solution
Automating the proposal process can increase a company’s productivity dramatically, on both
the personal and team levels.
A Proposal Coordinator kicks off the process from within a smart document hosted in Word
2003. As the smart document opens, the Task Pane displays a list of actions specific to the
proposal generation process. Selecting the Create RFP Response action starts an automatic
provisioning process that:

Creates a SharePoint workspace and a SharePoint Portal site for the response project

Places a response template in the workspace, together with similar previous proposals

Queries the company’s knowledge base for supporting data and places it in the
workspace

Creates a distribution list for members of the project team and schedules prep and review
meetings
The response template is also a smart document. From within this document, the Coordinator
can select the Assign Tasks action, which sends a request to various team members, for
example to complete specific sections of the response, or to coordinate activities, or to
communicate with the potential customer. Team members receive e-mail notifications of their
tasks as Smart Tags, which make it easy for them to work on or delegate their tasks, or
update the status of the tasks. At the same time, the Coordinator can track the progress of
these tasks in the SharePoint workspace task list or graphically through a Visio 2003 diagram.
From within Word 2003, the Coordinator protects the team’s proprietary work by securing the
response documents before they are sent to the proposal requestor, allowing them to be read
but not forwarded. Digital Rights Management (DRM) Server enables not only security
settings, but also tamper-resistant locks.
Finally, the Coordinator assembles the proposal using InfoPath 2003. The completed
document includes an underlying XML schema, which defines the structure of the proposal
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and identifies content elements. Microsoft SQL ServerTN provides the repository for capturing
and retaining the proposal data, making the data available for access by other systems within
the company. The use of XML allows the organization to manage the content for later reuse,
search, etc.
Synopsis
 Information workers can generate proposals faster and more efficiently.
 Information workers benefit from reduced repetitious work when substantial parts of the
proposal process have been automated using InfoPath 2003, smart documents, and
BizTalk Server 2004.
 Information workers can have easy and intelligent access to data, such as previous
proposals, market information, or customer data.
 The company gains control and tracking of the proposal creation process from within the
Microsoft Office System programs, leveraging Microsoft Office Outlook® 2003 tasks and
Visio 2003.
The Microsoft Office Solution Accelerator for Proposals enables organizations to compose a
higher number of winning proposals with greater speed, effectiveness, and compliance.
Insurance Claims Processing
When an insured party informs an insurance company of a loss, the company initiates the
claims process by collecting a variety of information. The process then moves offline with one
or more claims handlers assigned to manage the remainder of the process.
Problem
Some property and casualty claims are complex, especially when they correspond to a series
of events involving more than one covered item (for example, a tornado hitting an insured
home and car), and may even involve some personal casualty. Other claims, like personal
lines losses (theft, property damage, etc.) are less complicated, but still require accurate data
handling.
The form of the data collected has been already highly standardized; ACORD (Association for
Cooperative Operations Research and Development), a nonprofit insurance association,
develops and publishes more than 450 standard insurance forms, which more than 1,000
companies use, and which meet all regulatory requirements for the U.S. property and casualty
market.
The in-field assessments of the reported damage are far less controlled. Often, the high
volume of claims forces insurance companies to assign claims investigations to field adjustors
by their availability and physical proximity to the loss, instead of by appropriate skill set. An
inexperienced adjustor can expose the insurer to the potential risk of paying fraudulent or outof-policy claims.
Although the data collected follows a standard form, no validation is performed at time of initial
customer contact. The notification process may rely on paper forms or custom software
applications (depending on the size of the insurer), but regardless of format, inaccuracies
introduced during this step affect the entire process—and may delay payment.
Very complex claims further complicate the claims processes, which typically involve
numerous handoffs of information between different parties. Poor coordinated or incomplete
documentation handoffs can result in lost or inaccurate data.
Solution
It is very important that an insurance company gather accurate data in order to make informed
judgments about claims and to be able to analyze collective data for trends and risks.
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Automating the notification process allows insurers to ensure accuracy by eliminating
transcription and other error-prone activities.

Data Collection: An InfoPath 2003 form would standardize and streamline data
collection. Building a form that uses the ACORD schema could allow the insurer to
validate data at the time of entry and flag or highlight anomalies or data that falls outside a
preset range. This immediate validation would minimize opportunity for inaccuracy or error
at each subsequent step in an already overly complex process. In addition, the pre-tagged
claim information would facilitate processing by any number of back-end systems,
regardless of platform.

Workflow Management: BizTalk Server could provide workflow management and
process orchestration, automatically routing claim information, as XML packets, between
insurers, banks, underwriters, and other entities, regardless of the systems or platforms
used by any of the participants.

Information Security: Because some of the claims documents that route to multiple
entities outside the company contain sensitive personal information, they need to be
secured. The system automatically secures the documents and establishes rights using
the DRM capabilities in the Microsoft Office System applications and DRM Server, basing
the rights on requirements and policies established at the enterprise level.
Synopsis
 InfoPath forms allow pre-tagging of information during data entry; the use of XML means
the data entered once can be reused for multiple purposes, including workflow
automation.

Native support for industry standard and customer-defined XML schema and Web
services make for easier integration with business systems.

BizTalk Server provides a workflow solution and orchestration and automation of business
processes.
Purchase Order Routing
Problem
Business transactions are generally complicated and involve numerous steps. Suppliers who
make the effort to automate business processes not only improve productivity and save
money, but also solidify customer relationships by simplifying processes for the customer.
Business-to-business commerce can be complicated often by a lack of standard systems for
transacting business, including purchases, invoicing, payment, and order tracking. In the past,
making systems communicate has required heavy investments in back-end programming.
Small companies find themselves in a no-win situation: they have the most to gain from
automation but often don’t have development resources and can’t spend significantly to
implement automated processes, especially in a challenging economy. As a result, they must
rely on labor-intensive and error-prone manual solutions, such as paper-based order forms
and telephone customer service agents.
Solution
The customer deploys a set of electronic forms, including a purchase order created using
InfoPath 2003. These forms capture the necessary information and automatically apply a
customer-defined XML schema that represents the company’s unique processes.
When a customer-service representative completes a purchase order, the information passes
to a Web service that submits the order to the supplier. BizTalk Server mapping capabilities
translate the company’s unique XML schema to the supplier’s required format, so neither party
has to compromise their processes to facilitate fully electronic exchange of data.
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BizTalk routes the InfoPath form directly to the company’s SAP order fulfillment system using
a custom SAP connector to map the required data to the fields in the SAP system. However,
business rules dictate that if the order exceeds a certain value, an Invoice Manager needs to
review the order before it is submitted. In this case, the system routes the order to the Invoice
Manager in an e-mail message that appears in Outlook 2003, with a deadline set and
reminder flagged. The Invoice Manager reviews the order and notes approval in the InfoPath
form. A custom SAP connector lets the InfoPath form interface with the SAP system.
Synopsis
The solution described in this scenario—

Provides seamless integration across systems.

Leverages existing enterprise systems.

Increases automation of the ordering process.

Strengthens customer/supplier relationship.
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Conclusion
The ability to manage the flow of information—by connecting applications, people, partners,
and data—increases an organization’s operational efficiency, improves productivity, and
reduces costs. Connecting people to data and to one another enables faster, more informed
decisions and more highly empowered employees; and makes the most of a company’s
human capital and information assets. Connecting people and data also maximizes the supply
chain and solidifies supplier relationships.
The Microsoft platform for Business Process Automation provides a complete, end-to-end
integrated platform for enterprise technologies, which includes world-class desktop
productivity applications, seamless integration with Microsoft enterprise servers, and
interoperability with heterogeneous platforms, as well as support for XML and other industry
standard and Internet technologies. The Microsoft platform for Business Process Automation
provides the core technologies that:

Remove barriers and connect applications, people and data.

Increase productivity across the organization.

Let the organization meet new objectives without draining existing resources.

Result in a positive return on investment.

Provide world-class reliability and scalability for future growth.
This is a preliminary document and may be changed substantially prior to final commercial release of the software described herein.
The information contained in this document represents the current view of Microsoft Corporation on the issues discussed as of the date
of publication. Because Microsoft must respond to changing market conditions, it should not be interpreted to be a commitment on the
part of Microsoft, and Microsoft cannot guarantee the accuracy of any information presented after the date of publication.
This white paper is for informational purposes only. MICROSOFT MAKES NO WARRANTIES, EXPRESS OR IMPLIED, IN THIS
DOCUMENT.
Complying with all applicable copyright laws is the responsibility of the user. Without limiting the rights under copyright, no part of this
document may be reproduced, stored in, or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means (electronic,
mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise), or for any purpose, without the express written permission of Microsoft Corporation.
Microsoft may have patents, patent applications, trademarks, copyrights, or other intellectual property rights covering subject matter in
this document. Except as expressly provided in any written license agreement from Microsoft, the furnishing of this document does not
give you any license to these patents, trademarks, copyrights, or other intellectual property.
© 2003 Microsoft Corporation. All rights reserved.
Microsoft, BizTalk, InfoPath, Microsoft Business Solutions–Great Plains, Outlook, PowerPoint, SharePoint, Visual Basic, Visual Studio,
Visio, Windows, and Windows Server 2003 are either registered trademarks or trademarks of Microsoft Corporation in the United States
and/or other countries.
The names of actual companies and products mentioned herein may be the trademarks of their respective owners.
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