Has anyone considered the usefulness of embedding RIXML documents inside Office 2007 documents? For those who aren't familiar with them, Office '07 documents use an open "package" standard (ZIP) that can be cracked open. Once inside, the Office document itself is nothing more than a bunch of linked XML files and embedded resources like images, charts, etc.

This has a huge benefit to developers by enabling them to create and manipulate office documents without having office installed on the manipulating machine. The other benefit is that additional resources (such as an RIXML file) could then be stuffed inside the Office document.

Then, any RIXML-aware application can simply inspect the inside of any Office '07 document to see if there's annotated research included with that document, crack it open, and do what it likes with it.

Event handlers can be written in SharePoint '07 that "wake up" when a document is added to a document library. These event handlers could then open up the office document, take the RIXML document, parse it, and stuff the meta-data in SharePoint attributes.

The possibilities for extensibility using Office 2007 documents and XPS (XML Paper Specification) documents are limitless, and I was just wondering if anyone here had experimented with this concept of componentizing RIXML by piggybacking it on self-contained document packages? If so, what were your results, thoughts, conclusions?

Thanks!

- Kevin

Thanks for writing, Kevin, and for your interest in RIXML. What you describe certainly sounds like a promising way to employ RIXML tagging. I don't know of anyone in particular who has done what you describe, though. Most publishers of investment research documents are using Adobe's PDF format. Those who use RIXML post a RIXML file alongside each PDF file.