Some details
Green Valley developed a plugin called DSOI (Discovery Server Office Integration) for their CMS product that is used by a wide variety of government authorities, as well as corporate customers.
The plugin allows easy access from Microsoft Word to the document tree and dramatically improves user experience. It allows accessing, modifying, and uploading new documents to the CMS directly from Word and to also set metadata.
It opens Word files stored in the CMS. All of these actions are performed via the plugin’s menu added at installation.DSOI was written in C++ and it communicates with Office using COM and OLE technologies, so it could only be used with certain versions of MS Office libraries. Therefore, Green Valley was maintaining several plugin builds for each version of MS Word. And once users upgraded their Office version, the plugin became non-functional.
The challenge was to create a next generation plugin that would meet the following requirements:
Easy to install
Require no admin rights to install
Be as independent from a MS Office version as possible
Support multiple languages and be localized at least in English and Dutch
The technology proposed and implemented by Redwerk makes it easy to port the plugin to OpenOffice should there ever be a need to do so. Its modular architecture allows adding support for other storages, types of authentication and XML handling without changing the rest of the code.