Forum OpenACS Q&A: staroffice (openoffice) integration...

I was messing around with wvware the other day and I was not 100% convinced of the output, although it was already a good start.

So I thought to address some developers from www.openoffice.org (formerly StarOffice), if there was a possibility to get the highly developed staroffice conversion filters working on an openacs site.

He pointed me to this thread on one of the openoffice mailing lists.

I would be highly interested to get such a tool working in combination with file-storage... This might also be valueable for the Knowledge Management module that civilution is building.

I don't know if we could get people from openoffice to contribute, we'll see.

There is another thread on openacs, where I asked of possible solutions for this. Just in case you might want to read it.

Openoffice could be some threat to .NET if it worked in combination with a high class comunity system like OpenACS 😊
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Posted by David Kuczek on
You can check out the following mailing-list at openoffice.org to see the responses on my question concerning msoffice-formats conversion to html.

I haven't looked at openoffice in detail, but I am sure that they have integrated tools to additionally convert to .pdf and other formats.
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Posted by Rafael Calvo on
I think this is a GREAT idea.
.NET is just air... so far.
I looked at the openoffice thread but did not find anything of interest. What was your point there?.
I am not aware of all .NET initiative but as far as I know it includes delievering some office as services (end users would do wordprocessing online) but also defines web services (with a specification language) and a directory. The specs are in UDDI
The idea for UDDI and (I think all .NET) is that you would be exchanging XML (I don't know what MS gets from giving users that independece, I must be missing something). But if this the case reading and writing MS word kind of files would be easier (more open).
I want to read more about it, so if someone has a non marketing material please let me know.
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Posted by David Kuczek on
My starting point was the fact that I would like to integrate some kind of converter that displays different msOffice documents in HTML within the file-storage.

So I was checking out wvware.com. I compiled it and was not 100% satisfied with the output. Then I thought of StarOffice. They have filters to convert msOffice-formats to HTML or other web-valueable formats.

Then I thought, that it might be a nice idea to integrate the WordProcessor of openoffice as an application to the file-storage. We already had a discussion concerning the YahooMail "word-processor" on this bboard.

At that point Jörg Heilg wrote the following two posts:

"The project where we do this is called Sun ONE Webtop. I would love to see more development happening based on it. Yes, I know it is not open source. But it is scalable, it has a Web services API and it is intended for such usage."

"My name is Joerg Heilig and I am the engineering Manager for Sun ONE Webtop. To answer the question, yes there is a product based on OpenOffice that offers these conversion capabilities. It is not exactly tailored to do only this. Instead it provides you the infrastructure to develop any Web application based on office productivity. Sun ONE Webtop comes with a multi-tier architecture designed for Web Applications. Please check out the details at http://www.sun.com/webtop."

I underlined the phrase that weptop was not open source. I don't know what SUN would think, if some of the capabilities that they offer with ONE (which sounds a little bit like .NET 😉 would appear within openacs.

My technical skills are not as advanced as I could say how easy it might be to integrate code mostly written in C++ into a tcl-based web-infrastructure. This I wanted to hear from some more experienced members of the community.
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Posted by Andrew Piskorski on
FYI, I have not tried or investigated it in any way, but the TOM conversion service sounds like it could be very useful. There is also a pre-release version of the software available from last year, which I didn't realize until recently.
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Posted by Stephen van Egmond on
There may be <a href="http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=01/06/09/1456200&mode=thread">reason to expect</a> that wvWare will improve.