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Reinforcing its positioning of Office as not just an applications suite but a development platform, Microsoft Corp. on Wednesday kicked off its first Office System Developer Conference.

The event at Microsoft's headquarters in Redmond, Wash., underlines the software maker's efforts to get developers to expand on Office. The company has offered several tools to do so, including Visual Studio Tools for Office, an update to which will be demonstrated Friday in a keynote speech by Chairman and Chief Software Architect Bill Gates.

By building on top of Office, businesses can turn familiar applications such as Outlook and Excel into a front end for enterprise resource planning (ERP) and customer relationship management (CRM) applications, Microsoft has said.

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Later this year, Microsoft plans to share some of the work it has done on Elixir with customers. How exactly the company will do that is still being worked out, the spokeswoman said.