Microsoft Corp and Ariba Inc will work together to integrated Ariba’s Commerce XML (cXML) with Microsoft’s BizTalk framework to define schema for communicating catalogs, orders and other e- commerce transactions. The companies say they will implement these e-commerce frameworks into their products. Ariba will add BizTalk to its e-commerce applications, while Microsoft will support cXML in its Commerce Server and BizTalk Server.
More worrying news is that the pair think they have come up with a better way to do XML Data Type Definitions (DTDs). Ariba plans to use Microsoft’s XML-Data Reduced (XDR) in the next version of cXML. The partners describe XDR as a richer way to define XML documents. As ever, no sooner does the industry come up with a standard than Microsoft and its partners decide it’s time to embrace and extend it .
