[xwiki-devs] [Proposal]Create a Microsoft Word Add-in to handle XWiki integration
Hi devs, I started writing an Add-in for Microsoft Word that could be a part of our Office integration strategy. In the next period I'm going to spend 50% of my time on developing this, here at XWiki Romania. The technology I use is .NET + VSTO. Yes, I know that .NET it's not in XWiki's area, but this technology is very powerfull and it can bring an advantage for our platform. Here is the design page: http://dev.xwiki.org/xwiki/bin/view/Design/MicrosoftOfficeAddin Please read it and give me some feedback. Florin Ciubotaru
as far as you don't recode XWiki in .Net, no problem and I don't see any other solution than .NET to integrate something in Word :) try also to foresee the same addin in OO ;) Pascal On Wed, Oct 15, 2008 at 6:03 PM, Florin Ciubotaru <[email protected]>wrote:
Hi devs,
I started writing an Add-in for Microsoft Word that could be a part of our Office integration strategy. In the next period I'm going to spend 50% of my time on developing this, here at XWiki Romania. The technology I use is .NET + VSTO. Yes, I know that .NET it's not in XWiki's area, but this technology is very powerfull and it can bring an advantage for our platform. Here is the design page: http://dev.xwiki.org/xwiki/bin/view/Design/MicrosoftOfficeAddin Please read it and give me some feedback.
Florin Ciubotaru
_______________________________________________ devs mailing list [email protected] http://lists.xwiki.org/mailman/listinfo/devs
Pascal Voitot wrote:
as far as you don't recode XWiki in .Net, no problem and I don't see any other solution than .NET to integrate something in Word :)
try also to foresee the same addin in OO ;)
Pascal
Hi Pascal, I will try to write as less code as possible on the client side and use the work we already have on the platform. The reason I started with MS Office is the market share, which as far as I know is something like this: - By revenue: 95% Microsoft Office, 5% the rest; - By number of users: 75-80% MSO, 20% OOo. Some users are using multiple online/offline tools. This are the worldwide numbers. It will be interesting to have them for France. It will be great to have a OOs plugin, but we don't have the resources to handle both, yet.
On Wed, Oct 15, 2008 at 6:03 PM, Florin Ciubotaru <[email protected]>wrote:
Hi devs,
I started writing an Add-in for Microsoft Word that could be a part of our Office integration strategy. In the next period I'm going to spend 50% of my time on developing this, here at XWiki Romania. The technology I use is .NET + VSTO. Yes, I know that .NET it's not in XWiki's area, but this technology is very powerfull and it can bring an advantage for our platform. Here is the design page: http://dev.xwiki.org/xwiki/bin/view/Design/MicrosoftOfficeAddin Please read it and give me some feedback.
Florin Ciubotaru
_______________________________________________ devs mailing list [email protected] http://lists.xwiki.org/mailman/listinfo/devs
_______________________________________________ devs mailing list [email protected] http://lists.xwiki.org/mailman/listinfo/devs
I agree with you :) I really dislike Office because it is so proprietary, badly designed and full of bugs but anyone use it, me either... and I admit OO is not so good... Anyway, these softwares are only frontends... as far as the backend is not like Office, I don't care :) On Wed, Oct 15, 2008 at 9:57 PM, Florin Ciubotaru <[email protected]>wrote:
Pascal Voitot wrote:
as far as you don't recode XWiki in .Net, no problem and I don't see any other solution than .NET to integrate something in Word :)
try also to foresee the same addin in OO ;)
Pascal
Hi Pascal, I will try to write as less code as possible on the client side and use the work we already have on the platform. The reason I started with MS Office is the market share, which as far as I know is something like this: - By revenue: 95% Microsoft Office, 5% the rest; - By number of users: 75-80% MSO, 20% OOo. Some users are using multiple online/offline tools. This are the worldwide numbers. It will be interesting to have them for France. It will be great to have a OOs plugin, but we don't have the resources to handle both, yet.
On Wed, Oct 15, 2008 at 6:03 PM, Florin Ciubotaru <[email protected] wrote:
Hi devs,
I started writing an Add-in for Microsoft Word that could be a part of our Office integration strategy. In the next period I'm going to spend 50% of my time on developing this, here at XWiki Romania. The technology I use is .NET + VSTO. Yes, I know that .NET it's not in XWiki's area, but this technology is very powerfull and it can bring an advantage for our platform. Here is the design page: http://dev.xwiki.org/xwiki/bin/view/Design/MicrosoftOfficeAddin Please read it and give me some feedback.
Florin Ciubotaru
_______________________________________________ devs mailing list [email protected] http://lists.xwiki.org/mailman/listinfo/devs
_______________________________________________ devs mailing list [email protected] http://lists.xwiki.org/mailman/listinfo/devs
_______________________________________________ devs mailing list [email protected] http://lists.xwiki.org/mailman/listinfo/devs
Hi Florin, Sounds good. One thing you need to make sure is to have a pluggable network component on the .Net side so that you can use different ways to connect to the XWiki server. You need to specify for the server guys what the ideal server API is for your application to work. We could provide these in standard in XWiki so that we don't need scripts with programming rights in the Wiki to handle the connection. I think ideally the work done in the summer of code for the REST api would be a good candidate to receive the appropriate apis for that. Can you specify the server API in your document that you need. I see: - list pages as tree / list them by space / list them by parent-child (we need to choose which one and it needs to scale) - get wiki page as html - put html as wiki page (new or existing) - put office file as wiki page (full server conversion) -> this is if we want to use the OpenOffice importer for the Office->HTML conversion - get wiki page as office file (optional also) - put office file as attachment Ludovic Florin Ciubotaru wrote:
Hi devs,
I started writing an Add-in for Microsoft Word that could be a part of our Office integration strategy. In the next period I'm going to spend 50% of my time on developing this, here at XWiki Romania. The technology I use is .NET + VSTO. Yes, I know that .NET it's not in XWiki's area, but this technology is very powerfull and it can bring an advantage for our platform. Here is the design page: http://dev.xwiki.org/xwiki/bin/view/Design/MicrosoftOfficeAddin Please read it and give me some feedback.
Florin Ciubotaru
_______________________________________________ devs mailing list [email protected] http://lists.xwiki.org/mailman/listinfo/devs
-- Ludovic Dubost Blog: http://blog.ludovic.org/ XWiki: http://www.xwiki.com Skype: ldubost GTalk: ldubost
Hi Ludovic, Ludovic Dubost wrote:
Hi Florin,
Sounds good. One thing you need to make sure is to have a pluggable network component on the .Net side so that you can use different ways to connect to the XWiki server.
You need to specify for the server guys what the ideal server API is for your application to work. We could provide these in standard in XWiki so that we don't need scripts with programming rights in the Wiki to handle the connection. I think ideally the work done in the summer of code for the REST api would be a good candidate to receive the appropriate apis for that.
Can you specify the server API in your document that you need. I see:
- list pages as tree / list them by space / list them by parent-child (we need to choose which one and it needs to scale) - get wiki page as html - put html as wiki page (new or existing) - put office file as wiki page (full server conversion) -> this is if we want to use the OpenOffice importer for the Office->HTML conversion - get wiki page as office file (optional also) - put office file as attachment
Yes, that should cover the basics of a server side conversion. In the case of a client side conversion or wiki page editing(using Word's WebView), we also need: - get / put attachment, in order to store images - get / put object, used for styles and other data.
Ludovic
Florin Ciubotaru wrote:
Hi devs,
I started writing an Add-in for Microsoft Word that could be a part of our Office integration strategy. In the next period I'm going to spend 50% of my time on developing this, here at XWiki Romania. The technology I use is .NET + VSTO. Yes, I know that .NET it's not in XWiki's area, but this technology is very powerfull and it can bring an advantage for our platform. Here is the design page: http://dev.xwiki.org/xwiki/bin/view/Design/MicrosoftOfficeAddin Please read it and give me some feedback.
Florin Ciubotaru
_______________________________________________ devs mailing list [email protected] http://lists.xwiki.org/mailman/listinfo/devs
Florin Ciubotaru wrote:
Hi devs,
I started writing an Add-in for Microsoft Word that could be a part of our Office integration strategy. In the next period I'm going to spend 50% of my time on developing this, here at XWiki Romania. The technology I use is .NET + VSTO. Yes, I know that .NET it's not in XWiki's area, but this technology is very powerfull and it can bring an advantage for our platform. Here is the design page: http://dev.xwiki.org/xwiki/bin/view/Design/MicrosoftOfficeAddin Please read it and give me some feedback.
It's hard to give feedback at this moment, since a lot of server technologies are not ready yet (mostly in early alpha or beta). The best advice is to keep everything modular, putting the code that transfers documents to and from the wiki behind a small interface, so that it will be easy to switch to a different back-end. I think you could look at how XEclipse works (from the user's perspective) to see how another remote client behaves, so that you can get some more ideas. -- Sergiu Dumitriu http://purl.org/net/sergiu/
Dragă Florin, A few preexisting systems to consider/look at: http://www.pdfonline.com/ http://casesblog.blogspot.com/2005/08/blogger-for-word-publish-to-web-from.h... http://www.openxmlcommunity.org/daisy/ Unfortunately, when using Word for web-publishing directly, it seems to bloat the structured document terribly ( http://www.uwec.edu/help/Webpub/wordweb.htm ); also there's issues with conversion to UTF-8 ( http://www.ljmu.ac.uk/cis/webpublishing/81434.htm ) or foisting nonstandard charsets like Windows-1232 on web-viewers. Cutting/pasting between word and Xwiki, Roller or other rich-text capable web-editors seems to work nicely. It's too bad one can't automate the "cut/paste" of the data that flows through the windows GUI between Word and Web-Browser, but instead, directly saves an Xwiki doc... Maybe it's just a matter of having a service on the Xwiki-end that saves an RTF document as an Xwiki doc, combined with a simple plugin on the Word-end to invoke the data-translation which normally occurs during cut/paste. On Wed, Oct 15, 2008 at 9:03 AM, Florin Ciubotaru <[email protected]>wrote:
Hi devs,
I started writing an Add-in for Microsoft Word that could be a part of our Office integration strategy. In the next period I'm going to spend 50% of my time on developing this, here at XWiki Romania. The technology I use is .NET + VSTO. Yes, I know that .NET it's not in XWiki's area, but this technology is very powerfull and it can bring an advantage for our platform. Here is the design page: http://dev.xwiki.org/xwiki/bin/view/Design/MicrosoftOfficeAddin Please read it and give me some feedback.
-- Niels http://nielsmayer.com
see below 2008/10/17 Niels Mayer <[email protected]>
Dragă Florin,
A few preexisting systems to consider/look at: http://www.pdfonline.com/
http://casesblog.blogspot.com/2005/08/blogger-for-word-publish-to-web-from.h... http://www.openxmlcommunity.org/daisy/
Unfortunately, when using Word for web-publishing directly, it seems to bloat the structured document terribly ( http://www.uwec.edu/help/Webpub/wordweb.htm ); also there's issues with conversion to UTF-8 ( http://www.ljmu.ac.uk/cis/webpublishing/81434.htm ) or foisting nonstandard charsets like Windows-1232 on web-viewers.
Cutting/pasting between word and Xwiki, Roller or other rich-text capable web-editors seems to work nicely. It's too bad one can't automate the "cut/paste" of the data that flows through the windows GUI between Word and Web-Browser, but instead, directly saves an Xwiki doc... Maybe it's just a matter of having a service on the Xwiki-end that saves an RTF document as an Xwiki doc, combined with a simple plugin on the Word-end to invoke the data-translation which normally occurs during cut/paste.
I think this is the classical way of interacting between WORD and heterogeneous servers: RTF... I have never studied the question deeply but Doc format is really not practical and proprietary with a mix of text and binary data... I remind other wikis (such as confluence) propose such word plugins... Does anyone know how they do? Pascal
On Wed, Oct 15, 2008 at 9:03 AM, Florin Ciubotaru <[email protected]
wrote:
Hi devs,
I started writing an Add-in for Microsoft Word that could be a part of our Office integration strategy. In the next period I'm going to spend 50% of my time on developing this, here at XWiki Romania. The technology I use is .NET + VSTO. Yes, I know that .NET it's not in XWiki's area, but this technology is very powerfull and it can bring an advantage for our platform. Here is the design page: http://dev.xwiki.org/xwiki/bin/view/Design/MicrosoftOfficeAddin Please read it and give me some feedback.
-- Niels http://nielsmayer.com _______________________________________________ devs mailing list [email protected] http://lists.xwiki.org/mailman/listinfo/devs
Hi Niels, Thanks for the info. I am currently converting Word's html output to UTF-8, using .NET, before sending the data to the server. The first version of the add-in will store html. But, our goal is to store all the documents in wiki syntax, which is then handled by the renderer. This renderer's output is in a standard encoding so that the users wont have the problems caused by Windows-1232. Thanks for telling me about this issue, I will definitely keep an eye on it. Florin Ciubotaru Niels Mayer wrote:
Dragă Florin,
A few preexisting systems to consider/look at: http://www.pdfonline.com/ http://casesblog.blogspot.com/2005/08/blogger-for-word-publish-to-web-from.h... http://www.openxmlcommunity.org/daisy/
Unfortunately, when using Word for web-publishing directly, it seems to bloat the structured document terribly ( http://www.uwec.edu/help/Webpub/wordweb.htm ); also there's issues with conversion to UTF-8 ( http://www.ljmu.ac.uk/cis/webpublishing/81434.htm ) or foisting nonstandard charsets like Windows-1232 on web-viewers.
Cutting/pasting between word and Xwiki, Roller or other rich-text capable web-editors seems to work nicely. It's too bad one can't automate the "cut/paste" of the data that flows through the windows GUI between Word and Web-Browser, but instead, directly saves an Xwiki doc... Maybe it's just a matter of having a service on the Xwiki-end that saves an RTF document as an Xwiki doc, combined with a simple plugin on the Word-end to invoke the data-translation which normally occurs during cut/paste.
On Wed, Oct 15, 2008 at 9:03 AM, Florin Ciubotaru <[email protected] <mailto:[email protected]>> wrote:
Hi devs,
I started writing an Add-in for Microsoft Word that could be a part of our Office integration strategy. In the next period I'm going to spend 50% of my time on developing this, here at XWiki Romania. The technology I use is .NET + VSTO. Yes, I know that .NET it's not in XWiki's area, but this technology is very powerfull and it can bring an advantage for our platform. Here is the design page: http://dev.xwiki.org/xwiki/bin/view/Design/MicrosoftOfficeAddin Please read it and give me some feedback.
-- Niels http://nielsmayer.com
On Oct 15, 2008, at 6:03 PM, Florin Ciubotaru wrote:
Hi devs,
I started writing an Add-in for Microsoft Word that could be a part of our Office integration strategy. In the next period I'm going to spend 50% of my time on developing this, here at XWiki Romania. The technology I use is .NET + VSTO. Yes, I know that .NET it's not in XWiki's area, but this technology is very powerfull and it can bring an advantage for our platform. Here is the design page: http://dev.xwiki.org/xwiki/bin/view/Design/MicrosoftOfficeAddin Please read it and give me some feedback.
Sounds good to me. To put this into context this what we would have for converting office documents to wiki pages: * Ability to import any type of Office document (OO, MS Word, etc) using the current office importer (alpha right now). This is the work that Wang Ning has started and it works by installing OO on the server. We use jodconverter to communicate with it and we use our HTML parser to transform the HTML produced by OO and to convert it to wiki syntax. * Ability to use this MS Office plugin so that if you're editing in MS Office you can easily edit/save a xwiki document. This would also work using the HTML parser to convert the content to wiki syntax. The advantage over the first approach is that MS HTML export should be better than OO's one for MS office docs and if you're using MS OFfice then the integration is tighter. The disadvantage is that it works only with formats supported by MS Office. Both are complementary and the users will have the choice. Thanks -Vincent
participants (6)
-
Florin Ciubotaru -
Ludovic Dubost -
Niels Mayer -
Pascal Voitot -
Sergiu Dumitriu -
Vincent Massol