View external format content in Drupal

By aireworth on 24 Jun 2008 at 21:39 UTC

Hello Folks

This post was stimulated by Tosin's one below, but I thought it warranted a thread of it own.

I've been puzzling with a problem for the last month or so and its really got me stumped. I've set up an intranet site at work, and for the most part it does what I want. However I have one big problem - viewing content produced in word, excel and PDFs in Drupal. A very large part of what I wanted an intranet for was as a central repository for all the various pieces of documentation we need around the business, as well as a way to communicate and interact. Most of this info has already been produced and is on someones computer somewhere - mostly in word or PDF format. Somewhat late in the day I have discovered there appears to be no easy way to display this info in Drupal. (For some reason I just assumed it would be easy....) From word I have to convert to HTML and then run it though one or two filters, then manually import it to Drupal using cut and paste. Tedious, and something others in the business are not prepared to put up with. Basically the infos not going onto the intranet because its too difficult to get it there.

Has anyone else come across and surmounted this problem? Am I missing something simple, or do I have to go to a proper knowledge management system to get easy integration for my already generated content. This is not just a one time problem - people are going to continue to generate PDFs and use word, and we get info from external source which will always come in these formats - so it has to be a solution that's more than just a one time conversion effort - it must be trivial for users to upload this type of content.

All ideas gratefully recieved.

many thanks

Colin

Comments

Converting to Drupal

zeta ζ commented 24 June 2008 at 22:18

Wow, do you want Drupal to do the washing-up too – it has a kitchen sink!

Unfortunately, the task itself is not trivial;

Probably the easiest way at the moment is to upload & store the document itself, if that is the only user interaction you will tolerate. You are unlikely ever to get conversion integrated into the upload process: Why ask a web-server to process such files? You should do this on the desktop, IMHO.

Here are some posts you could look at for links to converters and other ideas;
http://drupal.org/node/15178
http://drupal.org/node/5887
http://drupal.org/node/49361
http://drupal.org/node/112530
http://drupal.org/node/183935

I believe there is a pdf2html converter available too.
___________________
It’s in the detaιls…
_{demonstration portfolio}

and drying up as well

aireworth commented 24 June 2008 at 22:49

Zeta,

Its a content management system - silly me, I thought it could manage my content!

Thanks for the links, they confirm that several people have looked for this type of functionality yet none have found it. I do believe its present in some true knowledge management systems, such as Contineo, Knowledge Tree and Alfresco - and you did link to one post that suggests its in Ezpublish. I may have to look at that.

As you say "It's in the detail..." the detail in this case being that my users don't know that its a silly idea for a CMS to have this - they see it as an obvious function that should be present.

Colin