Publish from any app / integrate Desktop Connector

[MentalNomad]

Deki could become a runaway hit as a simplified document management system if it were easier to publish documents to it from different applications.

This would seem to be a natural extension of the Desktop Connector...

What I'm thinking of is the ability to work in an MS Office application (Open Office too, of course) and then click a Publish button or choose File - Publish To, and get the Desktop Connector instead of a File Browser.

Right now, my testers are finding that the need to save files to a local drive, and then Upload them from a wiki page is cumbersome. Conversely, having to files locally and then drag them into Desktop Connector is cumbersome.

Tools like SharePoint allow "saving" capability to be integrated into the Office apps; an Office plug-in like this would go an enormous distance towards closing the functionality gap.

[MentalNomad]

Afterthought: this should also allow documents attached in the Wiki to be edited "in place" using the actual Office Apps.

Currently, a user can double-click a doc to open it in the native App, but cannot save changes to the original. If there were a Publish option, then could edit and push the document right back to the Wiki page - where it would be captured as a revision, of course.

[phillfri]

As another end user, I think you're on the right track MentalNomad. There is no doubt that the corporate goal is to push content creation down to the end user where the knowledge resides. And in the Web 2.0/3.0 world, where software is to be promoted as a service, this capability will be absolutely mandatory. If any software company believes that the web software services model is the future, then they are missing the boat if they aren't taking this 'division of labor' issue very seriously.

I believe Deki Wiki is trying to get there, albeit ease of end user interface with the wiki has naturally taken a back seat to the more pressing issue of getting the basic technical architecture in place first. It all takes time :)

[davidnovo]

my 2 cents:

This would be very, very useful feature.

[SteveB]

This sounds a lot like WebDAV with revision control, am I right?

[MentalNomad]

This sounds a lot like WebDAV with revision control, am I right?

<looks up WebDAV>

Yes, that sounds roughly like it. WebDAV already has Version in there (the V), but no matter. Being able to write back via http protocols sounds like it does the trick.

From the user's vantage point, Deki Wiki already handles revision control on attachments uploaded via the current methods... It SEEMS like an small step to extend that so that you can save document versions to the wiki from an Office App, but that appearance may just be an artifact from the Desktop Connector having such a simple interface that it hides the complexity. (In which case, nice job!)

[R0yk3]

Publish options like the outlook connector are very handy. If you have the same options within word/excel or writer/calc this would be great. Altough i see a problem. Just text no problem the word file can be uploaded and integrated within the wiki, not as atachement but as actual content. But to do this with Excell??? how do you keep the functionality of he document?? Or wil everything be published as attachment? if so will deki index the content of the attached file??

[MentalNomad]

I'm looking for them to be posted as attachments. The Lucene index does index attachments for most common types of documents.

[SteveB]

I think we have an early-alpha for publishing from Word and Excel to Deki Wiki. It's a bit like the Outlook Connector, except that it both creates the page and attaches the document at the same time (for the obvious reason that you want to preserve the full, original content). However, currently nobody is working on it anymore. Anyone with good Windows and C programming skills interested in finishing it up?