Office Connectors

Background

Currently, there are installable buttons that allow direct publishing from Microsoft Outlook and allow direct uploading from Microsoft Windows machines to MindTouch Deki. There exists a need, however, for an easy-to-use client-side plugin that allows for one-click publishing from Microsoft Word directly to Deki. FCKeditor has functionality for copying and pasting Word documents, but there is no existing functionality available for one-click publishing from within Word.

Functionality Overview

The concept would be similar to the plugin for Microsoft Outlook; a "Publish" button would be installed to a toolbar within Word, appearing something like this:

This button will take the current document, and publish it to Deki using the name of the document as the page title within the wiki. Any images from within the document would automatically be uploaded to that page of the wiki as well, allowing the wiki page to maintain the same layout as the Word document.

Concerns/Considerations

Converting Word documents to XHTML tends to require pre- or post-processing to deal with the large number of tags created by Word. The MindTouch Deki Word plugin will have to strip the excess tags out, inserting tags where necessary, to maintain the original layout of the document. It will have to be decided as to whether inline styles get extracted out into a stylesheet, or whether they will remain inside the document in the wiki.

The plugin will likely be able to publish documents to a path other than the user's path (e.g., specify a destination path rather than default to the user's path on the wiki). It would also be ideal to add multi-document publishing functionality to the plugin, as well as the ability to publish a document directly to the wiki as an attachment.

Technical Scope

Phase One Requirements: (early beta, expected availability October 2008)

• Allow for installation of Word Connector to a client-side machine with Word 2K8
• Allow for configuration of connector to publish to a specific Deki install with username/password at a specific path in Deki
• Parse Word document for embedded images, and attach to page, and embed images automatically
• Parse Word contents and strip Office-specific styles (should foreground/background colors be maintained?)
• Word document becomes saved with the filename of the document (minus the extension) - subsequent publishes should overwrite the existing copy for diff views

Phase Two Requirements: (timeline TBD, expected Q4 2008)

• Extend Desktop connector to allow for a group of documents to be published to Deki as Deki documents and not file attachments (following the same specifications above)