NEW YORK--Sept. 14, 2004-- Xerox Corporation's Global Services division has developed a systems integrator alliance with Microsoft Corporation, designed to help businesses improve the connections between their office workers and business-critical information. By combining Xerox Global Services' document management know-how with Microsoft technology, the partnership will help customers capitalize on XML-based content management solutions, which essentially "tag" information so workers can extract precisely the information they need when they need it. "Our relationship with Xerox further strengthens the business value that Microsoft brings to our customers," said Jane Landon, general manager, .NET Market Development, Microsoft Corporation. "Xerox's expertise with document and content management is a key factor in aligning our resources with them to bring solutions to the marketplace that drive productivity gains and improve worker productivity." According to the Information Worker Productivity Institute, a consortium of companies and academics that focuses on the relationship between information worker productivity and profitability, employees spend up to 40 percent of their day using technologies to process work-related information. With that in mind, key to the alliance strategy is Xerox Global Services' Information Worker Productivity Assessment, based on Lean Six Sigma methodologies. The assessment begins with Xerox experts who evaluate how a company and its people create, share and manage content and documents. Then Xerox and Microsoft use the IWPA data to identify ways to achieve efficiency gains, cost-savings and improved access to critical business information. By leveraging the smart document capabilities built into Microsoft Office 2003, Xerox helps businesses leverage XML and XML Web Services to streamline document-intensive business processes, such as airline maintenance and repair advisory bulletins, product documentation and regulatory compliance filings. "Xerox's strong heritage with documents along with Microsoft technology gives us an arsenal of solutions and services designed to help clients manage the millions of documents, either hardcopy or electronic, that are needed daily to conduct business," said Thomas J. Dolan, president, Xerox Global Services.