Microsoft to relieve 'Excel hell' with Web crawler

Network World - Business data is growing so fast that the task of managing it all is becoming near as complicated as indexing the Web, and new technologies are needed to help enterprises cope.

The message from Microsoft researcher Andrew Conrad

That's the message from Microsoft researcher Andrew Conrad, who is leading the company's "Project Barcelona" to create a metadata information server to help businesses "understand and facilitate management of data across the enterprise." The project will provide crawlers to extract metadata from Microsoft products and an index server with an API to allow querying.

Business data is expanding so fast that it's becoming nearly as complicated for enterprises to manage it as things now stand to index the Web.

The corporate standard for storing data

Although relational databases have become the "corporate standard for storing data," Conrad says several trends have made the current model inefficient. These include the low cost of acquiring and storing data, the ease with which data can be moved and changed, proliferation of self-service technologies just as databases and Web portals, leading non-developers to build and maintain data-producing services, and "Excel hell," what Conrad calls "the great proliferation of Excel as the enterprise data management tool."

The Microsoft team working on a solution to these problems is jokingly calling it the "Marauder's Map," afterwards the magical map in "Harry Potter" that shows the location of every person in Hogwarts.