2

We're in the process of converting a legacy desktop application into a web enabled equivalent.

However one feature is causing difficulty, editing MS Word documents.

Current proposed solution is publishing the DOC and DOCX files via WebDAV and using a custom ActiveX component to launch WinWord and pointing it at a file via a URL.

This works but it's limited in scope and the worlds moved on since it was conceived.

Is is possible to use the new Office Web Apps to do this completely in-browser?

So, still publish DOC files via WebDAV, but only to a web server hosting the Office Web Apps and redirecting the user to a URL rather than launching a local windows exe via activex.

Can you do this with the new Office Web Apps? Where is the documentation on how to achieve this?

RoboJ1M
  • 1,590
  • 2
  • 27
  • 34

1 Answers1

1

Yes, you can launch editing of MS Office documents from a web browser, using the sharepoint dll available in IE:

Eg

Set EditDocumentButton = CreateObject("SharePoint.OpenDocuments.3")
strDocument = 'http://localhost:8080' + strDocument; 
EditDocumentButton.EditDocument(strDocument)

If your server is running java you can use Milton (http://milton.io) to integrate directly into your business app and edit the document in place.

Brad at Kademi
  • 1,300
  • 8
  • 7
  • Thanks for that, that's actually really useful as it negates the need for rolling our own ActiveX component. However I'm actually looking for a method to take WinWord.exe and activeX completely out of the look. Office 2013 has a suite of web apps available. Trying to figure out if/how I can use those to edit the doc in-browser (HTML/JS) rather than just shell out word. – RoboJ1M Jul 18 '13 at 13:59
  • That would be nice, effectively an embedded form of Google Docs. Let me know if you come across anything, I'd love that too! – Brad at Kademi Nov 15 '13 at 23:14