Under Community Review

We are aware that many customers do content entry by copy-pasting from MS Word documents (which may have already gone through an authoring/approval workflow outside of Tridion).

So, something like an MS Word Import option seems like an obvious thing to have, but Mark Saunders nicely summarizes the complexity of generalizing and productizing such a thing. Indeed, we have had a MS Word Connector in the past, but it was functionally quite limited (assuming a form-like document structure) and didn't get used a lot in practice.

There has also been an initiative to create a very flexible and powerful successor which could handle so-called Compound Documents: a Word Document which is made up of several (linked) Components.  This was never released because it became too complex.

So, the idea makes a lot of sense, but we would have to get clarity on what the "sweet spot" would be: just enough flexibility to be useful for many customers/implementation.

Some additional questions to get clarity on the scope:

* Are there more people who remember the original MS Word Connector and issues with using it in an implementation?

* What about embedded images in Rich Text Fields?

* MS Word documents can be semi-structured (using headings which delineate sections).  Should it be possible to map this to nested fields or even separate linked Components?

* We are aware of customers who prepare an entire Page layout (incl. content) in a MS Word document, so the Word Document translates to a Page plus multiple Component (Presentations). Is this a common practice?

MS Word Importer

CME option to transform Word documents into Tridion components, extracting images from word and importing them into multimedia components, and paragraphs into RTFs. Could start with support for basic documents at first and improve over time. 

Could also be an MS Word plugin to have a button to "Save document in Tridion Sites". 

Philippe Conil
Parents

  • Perhaps it's worth having a discussion as to the reasons the MS Word Connector wasn't continued? I recall using this and each Word Upgrade causes issues?

    • I guess with current versions of Word this is less of a problem with the commitment to backward compatibility of the XML format.
    • I do wonder how 'generic' this could really be? Would having a simple mapping of 'image from word =>= general image multimedia schema' and how would we manage any mandatory fields (alt text etc.)
    • Would it make sense to have this only for 'create'?
    • If we need it for an update then we need to manage the mapping between an editor (or multiple editors' versions) and a Tridion Component 


    The more I think about this, the more it sounds like there will need to be a specific requirements phase for each client implementation resulting in a specific Word/Macro/Process delivery.

Comment

  • Perhaps it's worth having a discussion as to the reasons the MS Word Connector wasn't continued? I recall using this and each Word Upgrade causes issues?

    • I guess with current versions of Word this is less of a problem with the commitment to backward compatibility of the XML format.
    • I do wonder how 'generic' this could really be? Would having a simple mapping of 'image from word =>= general image multimedia schema' and how would we manage any mandatory fields (alt text etc.)
    • Would it make sense to have this only for 'create'?
    • If we need it for an update then we need to manage the mapping between an editor (or multiple editors' versions) and a Tridion Component 


    The more I think about this, the more it sounds like there will need to be a specific requirements phase for each client implementation resulting in a specific Word/Macro/Process delivery.

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