Publishing to the world

The four most frequent features that our customers typically ask for when implementing a Microsoft SharePoint solution are:

“I want to easily put our documents on our website”
“I want to publish directly into my web site in HTML from office documents, so the two are always in sync”
“I want to distribute my Office documents to CMS and externally at the same time”
“I want to make some of our intranet documents available to our external clients in a read only format”  

 As a result ioko created ioko-Publish to enable us to provide these types of links between Microsoft Office, SharePoint and the “outside world”.

Solution Overview

ioko Publish is specifically designed to allow users simply and effectively to automatically publish their Microsoft Office Document in a number of ways and can include publishing of documents to legacy HTML or ASP sites in either HTML or Adobe PDF formats. The solution also provides the uploading of documents into Microsoft CRM Sites, pushing documents to file areas in folders or via FTP or simply mirroring them directly to another SharePoint site. The solution can generate the appropriate RSS feed information for these uploads. All the administrators need to do is grant the users the appropriate rights.  

ioko Publish is extremely useful for publishing documents to your webstie as part of a FOI solution.

Features

• Converts Microsoft Documents (Word and Excel) to Adobe PDF (Version 6 and above)
• Can mark the destination document as “Read Only” to prevent alterations there
• Copy both original and converted documents to CMS, FTP, File Areas and WSS sites
• Simple user interaction of select action and click the “Publish” button.
• All publishing metadata is kept intact with the document when it is published to WSS or CMS.
• Multiple publish options easily selectable by administrator configuration.
• Built using .Net Web services for integration behind the scenes.
  

User Experience

The end user experience for Microsoft Office 2003 Information Workers is very simple and intuitive.  

• Whilst you are in your office document just select the “Tools” menu.
• Click “Publish…”
• A dialog opens with your permissible actions as choices.
• Make a selection from the list of actions.
• And then click “OK”.

For SharePoint portal users it’s even simpler:

• Just select your document in SharePoint
• Choose from the list of actions you are allowed to perform in the Publish web part and multiple sections are allowed.
• Click “Publish”.

Administration

ioko Publish provides an intuitive administration interface in a Web part that’s simplicity itself to use, allowing administrators to:

• Quickly add the publishing capability to their Portal or WSS site.
• Add Metadata to control which documents should be published.
• Enable and configure user rights and which publish activities they can perform.
• Enable a document library to have multiple named publishing actions.

Benefits

• Keeps your internal and external views of Microsoft Office Document in sync.
• Copying and conversion of files is handled by a web service so everything processes asynchronously and does not tie up your applications
• As simple to use as a Web part in SharePoint 2003.
• Publishes to different repositories in a single action
• Automatically converts your Microsoft Office Documents to PDF or HTML.
• Provides the link between SharePoint and the “outside world” providing functionality to automatically copy documents to legacy websites (FTP), Microsoft CMS Websites, File areas and other Portal and WSS sites even if on a completely different domain.