The links between Atlassian and Microsoft Office grow stronger with Atlassian’s latest Connector between Confluence (their Wiki product) and Microsoft Word, Excel and PowerPoint. In this case the Connector allows content on the Confluence Wiki to be imported, edited and updated from Word, Excel or PowerPoint. Check out the super simple 3 and half minute video to gain a good understanding. The thing I like about the Atlassian offering is how damn simple it is!
(Note: This is different to their SharePoint connector beta that they released last October)
This is of particular interest to us at Elcom because we’ve recently started work on a Microsoft Word Connector for our Community Manager product. The result will be to allow editing/update of content (ie content management) directly from Word. (Note: not to be confused with document management eg how the Office suite does works with SharePoint – which is something else entirely, but something we are also looking at).
BTW if you are interested in Atlassian and Microsoft Office then make sure you’re at the Sydney Business & Technology User Group (SBTUG) next week (Wed 27 Aug) – we’ve got Mark Hetherington (from TileFile) talking about how he runs his whole software company on Atlassian JIRA & Confluence, and then Alistair Speirs talking about how to improve business processes using Forms in Microsoft Office. Well worth attending – details here.
(via Alistair Speirs)
Seen ScribeFire? (here -http://blog.scribefire.com/help/supported-services/). It’s a Firefox plugin for writing blogs etc to any blog with the MetaWeblog API – ie. Blogger, WordPress etc. Exposing the MetaWeblog API might be worth looking into so all sorts of clients could be used. I don’t know the API so I’m not sure how adaptable it is.
Also, Blogger has a MS Word plugin – http://buzz.blogger.com/bloggerforword.html
The blogger API methodology would be worth looking into.
I think the point you made about it being simple is a key one. The user will choose the path of least resistance. Well, I would and I’m a user.
Seen ScribeFire? (here -http://blog.scribefire.com/help/supported-services/). It’s a Firefox plugin for writing blogs etc to any blog with the MetaWeblog API – ie. Blogger, WordPress etc. Exposing the MetaWeblog API might be worth looking into so all sorts of clients could be used. I don’t know the API so I’m not sure how adaptable it is.
Also, Blogger has a MS Word plugin – http://buzz.blogger.com/bloggerforword.html
The blogger API methodology would be worth looking into.
I think the point you made about it being simple is a key one. The user will choose the path of least resistance. Well, I would and I’m a user.
Thanks Ewen, good points.
We’ve looked into supporting the MetaWeblog API for the blog part of our product (and are in the process of implementing it). This is really nice, and allows people to use Windows Live Writer etc as well.
However the MetaWeblog API only supports a limited set of functions (eg post and comments), so on the CMS side of things there is no support. Things like extensive Meta tags, multiple content items in a single page, events, forms and other attributes require special handling. We’ve written our own API for these things, and they are exposed similarly to how the MetaWeblog API exposes blog items.
And from there we can interact using Word (or any other product really) in the same way as the Blogger Word plug-in does with MetaWeblog.
Cheers,
Craig
Thanks Ewen, good points.
We’ve looked into supporting the MetaWeblog API for the blog part of our product (and are in the process of implementing it). This is really nice, and allows people to use Windows Live Writer etc as well.
However the MetaWeblog API only supports a limited set of functions (eg post and comments), so on the CMS side of things there is no support. Things like extensive Meta tags, multiple content items in a single page, events, forms and other attributes require special handling. We’ve written our own API for these things, and they are exposed similarly to how the MetaWeblog API exposes blog items.
And from there we can interact using Word (or any other product really) in the same way as the Blogger Word plug-in does with MetaWeblog.
Cheers,
Craig