Chapter 18. Offline Authoring with Document Converters
When people think of Web-based content management systems, they are usually thinking of an authoring experience revolving around the browser. While this provides a very easy way for many content owners and subject matter experts to create and manage the content in a Web site, at times this approach cannot satisfy all needs. Another approach to content management is using the familiar approach of thick clients such as Microsoft Office Word.
Microsoft provided this capability in Microsoft Content Management Server (MCMS) 2002, the predecessor to Office SharePoint Server (MOSS) 2007 Web Content Management (WCM), by using something called the Authoring Connector, which worked with Word 2002. Unfortunately, the MCMS Authoring Connector was not widely used because it required a client installation. Even then, after it was installed, it was not the most reliable way to author content, and the browser-based approach was still the primary recommendation for content authoring a MCMS 2002 Web site.
Microsoft elected to go in a different direction with offline authoring in MOSS 2007. This new approach works with the default installation of the Office clients. The new approach enables users to upload documents authored in a thick client, such as Word 2007, and then manually trigger a conversion process. The conversion process parses the document, generating an HTML version of it, and automatically creates a new page in the configured Publishing ...
