Microsoft outlines commerce strategy: BizTalk language plays central role.(Company Business and Marketing)

Looking to strengthen its status in the electronic-commerce marketplace, Microsoft is working on several products and services intended to allow applications to interoperate for business.

Key to the Microsoft strategy will be BizTalk, a framework based on the Extensible Markup Language (XML) that enables the exchange of business data among applications. BizTalk evolved from the Commerce Interchange Pipeline as a combination of the Component Object Model (COM) and XML (see "I-commerce attack," March 1, page 1), said Satya Nadella, general manager for e-commerce at Microsoft.

With BizTalk as the glue, Microsoft intends to put XML support in all of its Office, …