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I have an ASP.NET MVC 3 application running in Azure.

In one part of my application I want the user to be able to Create,Edit,Delete Documents (Word, Excel) in browser.

EDIT:

I've looking a three options right now, all with road blocking issues.

1) Open XML looked very appealing at first, since it does Almost everything I need and plays well with Azure. However, the one thing it doesn't do is allow a User to actually edit the doc in browser.

2) Using a WYSIWYG editor such as CKEditor or TinyMCE, since they allow the User to edit a doc in real time (However not excel.) The issue is I can't find a way to convert between Word and WYSIWYG formats (HTML.)

--I was trying to find something in OpenXML that would convert the two formats. Essentially merging 1) and 2) together.

3) Lastly, which seems like the easiest and most comprehensive, is to integrate Office365 into the App. All I would need is for Office Web Apps (Word,Excel) to save files to Blob storage. Also if a User clicked on a file, it would open up Office and allow the user to edit and again save the file. There are a few issues I've ran into with this tho. The only way I've seen the functionality I want work is to use SharePoint Online, which is not an option for me. Also I'm a little worried about salablity

I'm leaning way more towards 3) since it seems like it would be the fastest and most graceful solution.

Have you come across a good way of directing Office Web Apps to store (and edit) files on Azure without involving SharePoint?

James
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    By "in the browser", are you referring to something like Office Web Apps? – mcollier Feb 08 '12 at 20:07
  • I think so, but I'm not sure how web apps would connect to something like the Blob storage in Azure. Any thoughts? – James Feb 14 '12 at 05:25

1 Answers1

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Storing documents, you would want to put them either in Office365 or Azure storage. Since the instances are not durable, you don't want to write the files locally. If you want to let them do those things I think the easiest way would be to store them in blob storage and allow the users to upload/download/delete documents. Then they can download the files, edit them, and then upload the new file.

That keeps everything clean and allows them to edit using a local program and you don't have to implement an editor for Office or integrate with Office365, etc.

Tom
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  • That is the exact approach we are taking now, however we want them to be able to edit them in browser, hence the plug in for Office365 or something similar. – James Feb 23 '12 at 21:22