The Multiple Application X-Ray Imaging Undulator Microscope (or MAXIMUM) is a project being carried out jointly by the University of Wisconsin and the Lawrence Berkeley Laboratory. The principal mode of operation of the system is as a photoemission microscope. In this mode, the radiation from the 30-period undulator on the Aladdin 0.8 GeV storage ring is first passed through a monochromator and then focussed on a pinhole aperture. A 20X demagnified image of this pinhole is formed at the sample plane by a 2-clement microscope objective of the Schwarzschild design, whose surfaces are coated with multilayers to reflect soft x-rays (>77eV). While the diffraction limit of the microscope is around 300 A at a wavelength of 120 A, imperfections in the optics and intensity considerations limit the spatial resolution that can be obtained to about 1000 A. The sample to be studied is positioned at the focus of the microscope and the energy spectra of the emitted photoelectrons are analysed by a cylindrical mirror analyser. In this way it is possible to obtain detailed chemical maps of the specimen, with information on both its chemical components and their chemical status. In this paper we describe the design and operation of the the MAXIMUM beamline, and present some preliminary results obtained with solid state and biological samples.