What are smart tags?

For users, one of the more interesting features of Office XP is smart tags, which appear as dynamic buttons with pop-up menus or hyperlinks. The built-in tags do such things as allowing the user to undo automatic changes, and they make pasting format changes easier.

What do smart tags do?

The following are some of the actions smart tag technology can enable the user to do upon encountering particular types of text:

• Auto-Correct Options: Allows the user the undo automatic changes

• Paste Options: allows the user to decide whether they wish to keep the original formatting or match the destination formatting

• Persons name: send an email or schedule a meeting

• Street Address: present a map or driving directions

• Financial Symbol: retrieve the company's current stock price or show a financial performance summary

• Product identifier: display current inventory levels or production schedule

• Customer Identifier: show recent interactions with and purchase history for the customer

How useful are smart tags?

Smart tag technology is deep and robust, and it has broad applicability for personal and organisational contexts.

• Personally controlled: Users can specify which smart tag resources are active on their PCs on a per-application basis.

• Action-in-Context: All smart tag actions are presented in the user's current work context: a user never has to leave the currently opened document to use smart tag resources.

• Dynamic: Smart tag processing is usually done on the fly, as users work with documents, for efficiency and responsiveness reasons, as well as to keep actions under personal control.

• Hypermedia: Smart technology can draw upon an open-ended set of resources, ranging from local resources such as contact lists to Internet-based sites and services.

• Platform Service:  Smart tag technology does not work with non-Microsoft applications, so it is not designed to be an entirely open Windows platform service.

Smart tag technology can be used to gain greater utility from the following types of resources:

• Personal Data Repositories: these include contact lists and calendars

• Personal preferences for Internet-based Resources: these include your favourite news, weather, stock market, and other types of Internet-based information

• Organisational IT Assets:  given a customer identifier, for example, smart tag technology could be used to retrieve and display a history of recent interactions with the customer

• Applications and tools: these include grammar checking tools in Microsoft Word and communication tools in e-mail and instant messaging tools

 The Big Plus - The Programmable Interface

Much more substantial, though, is that the tags have a programmable interface. This allows custom code to be placed behind a tag, which can then be used to improve the process of creating complex documents and to automate functions. This technology puts power and convenience in the hands of users by reacting to their needs as they work. It also provides value to organizations by giving them a context-rich way to link business applications. This enables businesses to achieve enhanced productivity and a smoother business process experience. Enterprises willing to invest in these capabilities are more likely to see a return on investment (ROI) from Office XP than those just looking for packaged productivity functions.

Smart tag technology provides a very compelling reason for users of previous releases of Microsoft Office to upgrade to Office XP.

If you want further information on smart tags and the smart tags programmable interface, please contact us at the Quill on 6231 0577 or email us at quill@quill.com.au.

For further reading check out the following web sites:

Technical Case Study

Overview of Smart Tag Technology