Web Word Wizard
Introduction
gOffice launched the first true online word processor in 2004. Back then our
site was at Silveroffice.com. In 2005, Upstartle, Inc. launched their Writely
product at Writely.com. This was the first true online word processor to achieve
widespread attention. Google took notice and acquired Upstartle in March 2006.
Google reworked Writely and launched Google Docs, the current leader in online
word processors.
Google and Zoho have gotten users used to writing documents online through web
browsers. Thinkfree, of South Korea, offers a server version of their online
office suite, but it's priced per user at US $30/user per year. If you are
looking for a full featured online office suite you can install on your server,
you should leave this page and head over to Thinkfree, as they are the leader in
this category.
gOffice Web Word Wizard
gOffice Web Word Wizard is a wrapper around Microsoft Word 2007. This means you
can implement a subset of the features found in Word on your website. The output
quality of the files will be oustanding because the files will be true Word
files. Microsoft publishes written instructions in their developer knowledge
base on how to run Word on a web server, but they caution against doing so.
Microsoft also distributes free code to allow you to write current Word
documents directly using Microsoft Visual Studio based code, without involving
Word itself. Microsoft wants the Word format to endure and be used.
There is a long history of implementing online word processors by wrapping a
piece of software mostly associated with running on desktop client computers.
The first version of gOffice was simply a wrapper around the typesetting program
LaTeX. Writely was a wrapper around OpenOffice. So there is no shame in using
Word inside a wrapper. In fact, we would argue it's the best of all worlds to
run Word on the server if the goal is to create an online word processor.
Microsoft Word 2007 is a very capable piece of software. One can do almost
anything with it, as it's extremely programmable, more so by far than OpenOffice
or Corel's WordPerfect. There are tens of thousands of Microsoft Word Visual
Basic for Applications developers out there, and they can develop applications
for Web Word Wizard with almost no learning curve, as the development model is
so simple. One just writes a Word macro that does its processing locally to
Word, with no cross process calls. If it needs information, it reads it from
disk. Any output from the macro is written to disk. Thus, development can be
done successfully on normal desktop PCs running Word. Integration with your
website still needs to be done on a development machine with Visual Studio and
Internet Information Server, of course, but we point out how simple the Word
side of the development is to reassure you that working with gOffice Web Word
Wizard is nothing like trying to write (OLE) Automation code to script Word the
way Microsoft describes in its knowledge base articles. Our production server is
a 3+ year old Dell 1u server with only 500 megabytes of RAM, and only one single
core processor, and you can see in the demo that the response time is good given
that on every document request, three files are being created - a .doc file, a
.pdf file and a .png file. If you only need one file, the response times will be
shorter.
While running Word on the server is practical, you should keep in mind that you
can only use a subset of its features. The general idea is that you use an html
editor on your web page and when the user presses Download, the html is uploaded
to the web server where it is saved to disk. Then the Word code is started and
the html is imported. Often, some additional processing is performed. Finally,
the document is saved as a Word document, which converts the original html to
Word format with good fidelity. This is simple. But it also means you can't
expect to use features like automatic cross-referencing, automatic tables of
contents, automatic indexing or track changes. In this version of gOffice Web
Word Wizard, your users can't insert graphics into your documents directly, but
your macro code can insert graphics. You can also use templates that contain
even elaborate graphics. The next version will add the ability to let your users
insert and size graphics themselves. Note that there are work arounds to many
limitations. For example, if your users were to insert a [TOC] tag where you
would like an automatic table of contents to appear, your Word macro code could
easily replace that tag with the Word field code to generate the table of
contents based on the heading styles in the html.
gOffice Web Word Wizard was programmed by Kevin Warnock. Warnock also developed
the identically named Web Word Wizard product launched in 1997 by Document
Automation Systems, LLC, which Warnock also founded. You can find references to
the original Web Word Wizard on the web today. The gOffice Web Word Wizard
program works differently, and there are no lines of code from the decade old
product in the current product. However, we mention this connnection to point
out that the developer of Web Word Wizard has a lot of experience building
solutions around Microsoft Word. The old Web Word Wizard product was licensed to
over 30 large organizations, including Lucent, Coca-Cola, MCI, AT&T, Hewlett
Packard, Intel, Boeing, Ericsson and Northrop Grumman. The Web Word Wizard was
also deployed by the US Marine Corp and the US Department of Commerce. The
Department of Commerce used Web Word Wizard to prepare documents in the Patent
and Trademark Office.
Architecture
gOffice Web Word Wizard is implemented as a Windows Service which starts
automatically when Windows Server 2003 boots up. Nobody needs to be logged in to
the server to start Word manually. Your ASP.NET code communicates with the
Windows Service not by Automation calls which rely on undesireable unmanaged
code. One copy of Web Word Wizard can easily create thousands of documents per
day, as there are 86,400 seconds per day, and it only takes a few seconds to
create a document with gOffice Web Word Wizard, as demonstrated by the live demo
on this site.
System Requirements: Microsoft .NET Framework 3.5, IIS 6, Windows Server 2003,
Visual Web Developer 2008 Express Edition, MS Word 2007, 500 megabytes RAM.
Note that the next version of Web Word Wizard will also work with older versions
of Microsoft Word, since many haven't fallen in love with the 2007 version yet.
Note that 2003 macros run in 2007, so you can develop in 2003 and deploy in 2007
if you want to get started today with the current gOffice Web Word Wizard
version. For the record, the 2007 version is great once you get used to it.
Implementation help
If you are interested in gOffice Web Word Wizard but don't want to take on the
development work to build a custom application, you can engage gOffice on a
project or hourly basis to help you implement the solution. The rates are
affordable, so please do not hesitate to inquire. Note that we provide free tech
support by phone and email from 9am to 5pm Pacific Time to developers who
license the product to do the development work themselves.
Click here to buy Web Word Wizard
license