Forum OpenACS Development: MS Office Integration

Posted by Tom Mizukami on 06/11/04 07:40 PM

We are starting a project and looking at integrating MS Office 2003 xml capabilities into OACS/.lrn. Basicly an Office front end to a workflow enabled CM.

Is the code that Vienna University developed available anywhere? Is there any plan to bring this code into the toolkit? Is there anyone that wants to co-develop this with us? We have funding to get started, but probably not enough to bring this to completion by ourselves currently.

If anyone is working on something similar I would like to cooridinate our efforts?

Thanks.

2: ms / openoffice, docbook, reload (IMS CP / SCORM) & LORS (response to 1)

Posted by Rocael Hernández Rizzardini on 06/11/04 11:08 PM

Hello Tom, at E-LANE we are currently doing work on this area, so we might also be interested on do this together. Here's what we have (which is learning content oriented).
1. For content producer use a word processing tool (openoffice) for creating the content, you can use word documents with openoffice as well.
2. That content can also be "saved as" docbook (a structured oriented markup)
3. Then use *reload* to create the IMS CP (and if you want, also the whole scorm file)
4. Using LORS library you can import that content into .LRN, and render the content to the end user.

* the neat thing about docbook is that you can use that structure to also render parts of your document in different ways or to easily integrate searchs among specific areas. (we still need to reflect the docbook in openacs, probably using CR, no specific plans by now)

Note: further development / feedback / ideas are needed to make this process easy / automatic.

3: Re: MS Office Integration (response to 1)

Posted by Dave Bauer on 06/11/04 11:34 PM

One thing that can make it easier is using the WebDAV support along with the content repository (with filesystem storage I suspect)

Word works reasonably well with WebDAV and has been tested with the OpenACS implementation.

5: Re: MS Office Integration (response to 3)

Posted by Rocael Hernández Rizzardini on 06/11/04 11:42 PM

Interesting Dave ... do you know if openoffice can integrate with webdave? ;)

4: Re: MS Office Integration (response to 1)

Posted by Tom Mizukami on 06/11/04 11:53 PM

Dave,

Yea, that was what I was thinking. I played with your tDAV stuff a couple of months ago with Office and webDrive. I'll bring the released version up on a test box this weekend.

We have 0 developer cycles to do this. I will try to get some user requirements together and a RFP up next week. We will have to contract this out or hire a developer.

Rocael,

We also have some old code from where we took Word 2000 from specific templates and converted to simplified docbook and published. I haven't looked at LORS yet, no time...

I will try and get some user requirements together and we can see if we mesh at all. Thanks. I liked that ... "WebDave"

6: Re: MS Office Integration (response to 1)

Posted by Abelardo Pardo on 06/14/04 10:57 AM

Tom:

We're currently producing several courses in the context of the E-LANE project based on DocBook (a URL with the link to browse through it will follow shortly). The methods being used range from the OpenOffice solution Roca mentioned in

https://openacs.org/forums/message-view?message_id=190046

to an HTML to DocBook filter (tidy) which gives us a partially correct DocBook file from a given HTML.

The path: MS Word -> OpenOffice -> DocBook works up to a point. Fancy things such as tables don't go through that well yet. I'm guessing that over time, this path will improve its capabilities.

No direct and robust MSWord (or MS Tools for that matter) to DocBook has been found yet (some ideas in http://www-106.ibm.com/developerworks/xml/library/x-tipword.html).

Once in DocBook, Reload allows you to create a SCORM Compliant package, which by the way, uploads seamlessly through LORS.

So, the moral is perhaps that, although far from being at the point in which a clean DocBook is obtained effortlessly, the current tools get you fairly close to that. Once in DocBook, the path SCORM -> LORS seems fairly solid.

ABel.

7: Re: MS Office Integration (response to 1)

Posted by Tom Mizukami on 06/14/04 09:58 PM

Hi Abel,

I think our problem space may be a little narrower than yours. We have complete control over the templates that users use to develop content. We don't need a general solution to MS Word ---> DocBook. We use specific templates with defined styles ---> DocBook. We are also in control of the version of Office. Now with Office 2003 we should be able to go from Word template ---> html (or DocBook) ---> Word with just XSLT.

8: Re: MS Office Integration (response to 1)

Posted by Dario Roig on 12/02/04 09:13 AM

Hi!

From the University of Valencia we are trying to follow the recommendations of AND-LANE to generate contents.

With which version of OpenOffice recommends us to work?

Thanks