MarkLogic and Word 2007 Integration January 20, 2009

Marklogic has announced the release of  a toolkit for Word.  Much is written in certain circles these days about component content management.  I have often felt that the adoption of  CCM has not lived up to the nirvana  of reuse that we content management professionals strive to achieve. This gap has been due in no small part to the complexity of professional XML editors and their integration to repositories. Products like XMetal and Epic have GREATLY improved from where they started ages ago but it remains a hard sell in many business scenarios. People just don’t want to give up MS Word and many integrators have bought beach houses on the money they made making a tool for unstructured data pretend to be something more than it is.  Times have changed though and Microsoft’s support of XML has improved to the point where it may be a worth being considered as a viable alternative to the professional editors in certain circumstances. This integration is certainly interesting – but one caveat. Any time I see the word toolkit – I brace myself for more work than I bargained for.