Professional SharePoint® 2007 Web Content Management Development: Building Publishing Sites with Office SharePoint Server 2007

18.2. Overview of the Document Converter Architecture

Before diving into the intricacies of building a custom document converter, it is beneficial to understand the overall architecture supporting this capability. The document converter infrastructure is included as part of the Enterprise Content Management (ECM) strategy in MOSS 2007, thus it is included in the MOSS 2007 Standard license. The only limitation placed on the document conversion framework is that it can only run on member servers; it will not work on domain controllers. This is because the converters are executed under the context of a local account on the server. Domain controllers, by their very nature, do not have local accounts and thus will not work on a controller. This is one of the most common problems people run into, so be aware of this one simple fact: Document converters will not work on domain controllers, without a single exception.

The document converter infrastructure is run by two services: the Document Converter Load Balancer service and the Document Converter Launcher service. These two services are responsible for distributing the conversion load across the SharePoint farm and executing specific document converters on each server. When a conversion request is submitted, the Load Balancer service examines the registered servers in the farm that are running the Launcher service and the process queues for each. It determines which one has the lowest utilization and sends the conversion instructions ...