This is a brief update for an article I wrote about a year ago on how to create Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 DOC to PDF (and other) document converters using Aspose components.
A Bit of History
We have published the article initially at CodeProject in the SharePoint section. The article was actually quite popular and received lots of hits. However, after a few months it was deleted by CodeProject. The reason given for deletion was “the article promotes a commercial product”. Haha, they must have been joking… What about all other thousands of articles on CodeProject that promote Visual Studio, SQL Server, Office, Telerik and heaps of other commercial products. As far as I am concerned the article was perfect – it was a programming project with free source code.
Interestingly, the article is actually still accessible at CodeProject here http://www.codeproject.com/KB/sharepoint/DOC2PDF_in_MOSS.aspx and it ranks quite high in Google.
Of course, the article is still available in the Aspose.Words Documentation.
What’s New
Aspose.Words now supports Office Open XML (OOXML) load and save as well as OpenDocument (ODT) save. This means that you can actually add quite a lot of conversions to SharePoint. In fact, from any Aspose.Words load format to any save format:
- DOC2RTF
- DOC2WordML
- DOC2DOCX
- DOC2PDF
- DOC2HTML
- DOC2TXT
- DOC2ODT
- RTF2DOC
- RTF2WordML
- RTF2DOCX
- RTF2PDF
- RTF2HTML
- RTF2ODT
- RTF2TXT
- DOCX2DOC
- DOCX2WordML
- DOCX2RTF
- DOCX2PDF
- DOCX2HTML
- DOCX2ODT
- DOCX2TXT
- WordML2DOC
- WordML2DOCX
- WordML2RTF
- WordML2PDF
- WordML2HTML
- WordML2ODT
- WordML2TXT
If you need one of those converters in MOSS it must be a good time to try now. Don’t forget Aspose has other file format components for spreadsheets and presentations so you could use them for even more conversions.
If You Have Problems
There were many people who followed the steps in the article and it worked. Some encountered problems and reported to us in the Aspose Support Forums.
So far we’ve taken a stance of blaiming SharePoint’s overly complex procedure for adding and configuring document converters (you can see that from the article) and essentially refusing to provide technical support for SharePoint.
We are now considering what can be done to improve the situation. You could help by leaving a comment here or in the forums about the issue. Do you want a document converter for MOSS to be a ready installable product so you don’t have to tweak config files? What conversions do you actually need? And so on.
