Utah Open Source Planet

Seeing some of the searches that had brought people to my post on Alfresco and Microsoft Office Integration, I thought I would add this little tidbit: The add-in was designed to work for Office 2003, but it can work with Office 2007 as well.

From the Alfresco Wiki:

Although the Alfresco Add-Ins have been designed with Microsoft Office 2003 in mind, they are compatible with Microsoft Office 2007, with the following caveats:

Before installing the Add-Ins, ensure the .NET Programmability Support option has been installed for each of the Office applications you are installing the add-ins for. Normally these will be Word, Excel and PowerPoint.

• The options can be found by running the Office Setup program and expanding the list of available options for each application.
• You may need your original Office 2007 install media in order to add these essential components.

One of the coolest (at least in my book) things that was released with Alfresco 2.1 (we are actually up to 2.1.1 now) is the Microsoft Office Add-on. It is not just cool because it allows you to work from Word, Excel and PowerPoint directly in Alfresco, but because it is an excellent example of Web Scripts in action. The add-on is actually launching a web browser that hooks into these MS Office Applications. Web Scripts are a powerful integration point for Alfresco. (Search here for write ups on Web Scripts.)

The Alfresco add-in allows you to:

browse the repository

search within the repository

open, save, delete content

access version history and compare versions

transform documents to PDFs

start workflows

insert documents into an existing document (think of a folder with documents that are actually standard response to RFP or RFI questions, you can insert these responses directly into the RFP/RFI using the add-in.).

Alfresco is normally a zero-foot print install on the client side (You use your browser and/or mapped drive into the repository.) But this is really worth the 6MB for the whole bundle.