The next version of Microsoft Office is, among other things, a family of XML editors. I have discussed the XML modes of Word and Excel (see XML for the rest of us and "Exploring XML in Office 11"), and described the newest member of this family, InfoPath 2003, a tool for gathering XML data (see "Ten things to know about Xdocs"). Now that I've had a chance to work with InfoPath, its role and value are becoming clearer. [Full story at InfoWorld.com] ... [Jon's Radio]

Cool!!!  I'm getting pretty stoked about the new products in the Office family.  I've been drawn back to Office recently as a worthwhile development platform for small personal solutions like web publishing (not FrontPage, either--we're talking Word-to-XML conversion), mail filtering, Outlook add-ons, Excel XML export, and more.

But as for the new stuff, XML is a major part of the strategy.  OneNote is a different kind of product and fills in the other gap that I see in the personal productivity suite for the power user.  Note taking made natural.

Maybe by summer of 2003, I will find that the combination of products in Office 2003 will make my Notebase idea somewhat unnecessary.

I'll try to post some links to product info pages later.