Integrating Microsoft Office and Content Management Server 2001
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Introduction
A common problem faced by today's content contributors is the necessity of working in two worlds:
Microsoft Office (Word, Excel, PowerPoint, etc.)
The World Wide Web
Microsoft Office is a natural environment for authors to create content—documents, spreadsheets, and so on. But when the time comes to add this content to a web site, the contributor must switch gears and focus on the web, learning new techniques to migrate the existing content. While contributing content with Content Management Server (CMS) 2001 significantly reduces the training necessary to allow individuals to post content, getting the job done still requires two different tools in two different environments.
But what if you could contribute content to the web while working exclusively in Office? An author working in Microsoft Word, for example, could simply click a button and his content would become instantly available on the web. This article shows you how to unleash this powerful integration.
When we talk about "integration" between CMS and Office, there are really two types that we might like to see:
Contributing portions of an Office document to a web site
Contributing the entire document
The first method is really the act of taking content within a document, converting it to HTML, and placing that HTML into a template to form a web page. The second method involves uploading a document to the CM repository and creating a link to that document within a web page.
While the first method is probably the more desirable choice, it's prohibitively complex. The challenge is that we would be trying to move very unstructured data (the document "portions") into a highly structured template. Contribution of the entire document is less complex, but still accomplishes the same goal—making that content available via a web site.