Microsoft is readying a new tool that is designed to connect Microsoft Office applications to back-end enterprise systems.

The tool, called the "Information Bridge Framework," or IBF, is on tap to debut at the company's Tech Ed 2004 conference in San Diego next week, sources said.

IBF is designed to connect Web services to the Office client with no "extra hops" or intermediate servers required.

IBF is designed to build on top of the XML support that Microsoft already has built into its Office System 2003 applications, such as Word, Excel and Outlook. IBF will allow developers and information-worker users to expose "enterprise business objects" and then pull them right into their familiar Office documents. (Enterprise business objects, in this context, are entities such as "customers" and "purchase orders.")

Microsoft's plan is to deliver IBF version 1.0 in the fourth calendar quarter of this year. Visual Studio .Net 2003 users will be able to take advantage of IBF via an IBF Metadata Designer Plug-In, which will be part of Version 1.1, Version 1.1 also is due before the end of 2004, according to information on Microsoft's Web site.

In calendar 2005, Microsoft plans to deliver version 2.0 of IBF, which will add support for SharePoint Portal Server Web parts and Visual Studio Tools for Office integration. By the time Longhorn ships (2006+), Microsoft is planning to embed version 3.0 right into the operating system.

According to Microsoft's Web site, the target audience for IBF are "swivel-chair" information workers who use e-mail and documents in business processes and who need data from multiple sources to make decisions. IBF is not aimed at SAP ERP or MS CRM power users, or other who regularly employ structured business processes within a single application.

Microsoft is touting IBF's ability to simplify solution development by requiring little or no coding, and without expertise in languages like C, C# and C++. Among the kinds of solutions that can be more easily developed and deployed with IBF, according to Microsoft, are equity trading, customer-invoice processing, engineering change-management, customer complaint handling, and financial reporting.

Microsoft officials first discussed IBF publicly in April in Redmond, when Microsoft hosted about 150 independent-software vendor partners as part of an ISV road show.

At that time, product manager Adam Sohn told Microsoft Watch that IBF is designed to be a "Web services' way of integrating with Word, Excel and Outlook."

Sohn continued: "Part of our ongoing Web services work involves us using familiar tools to get at information stored in Office and line-of-business applications."

One of the key concepts behind IBF is "Information Bridge-compliant Web services." These are enterprise applications exposed as Web services containing prescribed metadata, or schemas. These Web Services are processed by an Information Bridge Engine on the client.

Microsoft plans to make production, development and test licenses for IBF available for no charge, the company's Web site says. Among the early adopter customers for the technology are Bayer BBS, Bank One and three different Microsoft divisions.

More information will be available publicly on IBF as of May 24 on the Microsoft Office Developer Center here.

(This is an expanded version of an article that originally appeared in the April 15, 2004, issue of the Microsoft Watch newsletter.)