MSDN has published an interview with Mike Moore, director of development for www.microsoft.com, about their use of XML for content management.

The interview is prefaced with a list of areas in which microsoft.com uses XML (and XSL) - Product Catalog, Registration, Search, and Download Center - and a walkthrough of a piece of the Product Catalog.

XML appears to have produced a scheduling miracle:

"Our product manager at the time almost had a heart attack when we changed technical direction and adopted unproven technology weeks prior to ship, but we actually shipped on time. In two weeks, we completely rebuilt the system using XML and ASP."

Moore bubbles with enthusiasm for the XML approach:

"It really exceeded our expectations. The whole code/data/presentation separation thing is a huge win. A lot of people don't realize how big a win this is. We didn't even realize it going in, but now we are finding new opportunities all over the place for re-using the content in ways we would have never thought of. This is one of the amazing things about XML. It is self-documenting. The data is the API, and people just consume it."

Moore did note a downside to this self-documenting and easily shared approach, however: "we just didn't realize when we published XML that we were publishing an API. When we change the XML schema we are going to break a bunch of people's code."

Related story:

• MSDN on XSLT, XML for TOC