Last week I had lunch with the application manager of a local customer that just completed their enterprise rollout of Office 2003. We had decided to meet and discuss possible ways his team could begin to utilize this deployment. As we sat down he explained that he had been talking to his team and had been investigating a project that he wanted to discuss. He explained that they had a variety of independent business processes that all ran within various Microsoft Office applications. He wanted to know if it were possible to connect these together using XML and the features of Office 2003. He explained that he had discovered Office natively supports XML, which had gotten him to think about ways his developers could take advantage of this feature. He was hoping leveraging this would enable him to connect these independent processes together and begin to share the various data that was collected throughout the enterprise. In this article I will explain, as I did that day, how you can use not only XML but many of the other associated standards such as Extensible Schema Language Templates (XSLT) and Extensible Schema Definitions (XSD) to build and integrate Office-based applications.