[Proposal]Create a Microsoft Word Add-in to handle XWiki integration

[Florin Ciubotaru-2]

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
devs@...
http://lists.xwiki.org/mailman/listinfo/devs

[Pascal Voitot]

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 <florinciu@...>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
> devs@...
> http://lists.xwiki.org/mailman/listinfo/devs
>

_______________________________________________
devs mailing list
devs@...
http://lists.xwiki.org/mailman/listinfo/devs

[Ludovic Dubost-2]

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
> devs@...
> http://lists.xwiki.org/mailman/listinfo/devs
>
>  

--
Ludovic Dubost
Blog: http://blog.ludovic.org/
XWiki: http://www.xwiki.com
Skype: ldubost GTalk: ldubost

_______________________________________________
devs mailing list
devs@...
http://lists.xwiki.org/mailman/listinfo/devs

[Florin Ciubotaru-2]

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
>> devs@...
>> http://lists.xwiki.org/mailman/listinfo/devs
>>
>>  
>>    
>
>
>  

_______________________________________________
devs mailing list
devs@...
http://lists.xwiki.org/mailman/listinfo/devs

[Florin Ciubotaru-2]

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 <florinciu@...>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
>> devs@...
>> http://lists.xwiki.org/mailman/listinfo/devs
>>
>>    
> _______________________________________________
> devs mailing list
> devs@...
> http://lists.xwiki.org/mailman/listinfo/devs
>
>  

_______________________________________________
devs mailing list
devs@...
http://lists.xwiki.org/mailman/listinfo/devs

[Pascal Voitot]

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 <florinciu@...>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 <florinciu@...
> >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
> >> devs@...
> >> http://lists.xwiki.org/mailman/listinfo/devs
> >>
> >>
> > _______________________________________________
> > devs mailing list
> > devs@...
> > http://lists.xwiki.org/mailman/listinfo/devs
> >
> >
>
> _______________________________________________
> devs mailing list
> devs@...
> http://lists.xwiki.org/mailman/listinfo/devs
>

_______________________________________________
devs mailing list
devs@...
http://lists.xwiki.org/mailman/listinfo/devs

[Sergiu Dumitriu-2]

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/
_______________________________________________
devs mailing list
devs@...
http://lists.xwiki.org/mailman/listinfo/devs

[Niels Mayer]

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.html
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 <florinciu@...>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
devs@...
http://lists.xwiki.org/mailman/listinfo/devs

[Pascal Voitot]

see below

2008/10/17 Niels Mayer <nielsmayer@...>

> 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.html
> 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 <florinciu@...
> >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
> devs@...
> http://lists.xwiki.org/mailman/listinfo/devs
>

_______________________________________________
devs mailing list
devs@...
http://lists.xwiki.org/mailman/listinfo/devs

[Florin Ciubotaru-2]

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.html
> 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 <florinciu@...
> <mailto:florinciu@...>> 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
devs@...
http://lists.xwiki.org/mailman/listinfo/devs

[vmassol]

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

_______________________________________________
devs mailing list
devs@...
http://lists.xwiki.org/mailman/listinfo/devs