
<A HREF="http://news.com.com/2100-1012-5093885.html">Microsoft is touting partner benefits</A> as a part of its promotional message for the launch of Office System, a new family of products that's built around its productivity suite. News.com reports that some of the most significant changes in Office involve the adoption of Extensible Markup Language (XML), an increasingly widespread standard for exchanging data between computing systems. XML is expected to allow companies to tie Web services into Office applications and ease connections between Office documents and corporate computing resources.