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MS Office Plug-in almost there - no thumbnails

zbennett
Champ in-the-making
Champ in-the-making
Hi all,

As a disclaimer, the first few paragraphs here are just the story of my Alfresco woes here at the office, so you can cut straight to my questions at the end if you get bored.  :wink:

I'm currently working with the Development department at my company so form an integration plan for Alfresco.  Development produces a lot of MS Office documents with images, and we have so many images that we need a better way to organize them (that's where Alfresco comes in).  During my last meeting with the developers, I showed them the Office plug-in and how I envisioned them using it. I thought everything was honky dory until I finished demonstrating the plug-in and they asked if they could just continue to browse for images on the network drive and forgo the use of Alfresco. My heart sank. I had spent the last month working almost exclusively on Alfresco - FOR THEM!

The big problem was that they like to see thumbnails while browsing images, but the Office plug-in doesn't show thumbnails. I showed them "how easy it was" to browse for images through Alfresco Share's document library, but that introduced "extra steps" to their current process.

I've since worked out a few alternative processes for finding images in Share and adding them to Office documents, which I'll be demonstrating for Development soon. I would really like to optimize the process for them, though.


Does anyone know if it would be possible to make image thumbnails appear in the Office plug-in? Is the source for the plug-in available somewhere? If not, Alfresco team, could it be?

If there isn't a chance of modifying the plug-in, can anyone think of a way to integrate part of the Alfresco repository with the Microsoft Clip Organizer for Clip Art?

Thanks,
Zach
2 REPLIES 2

mikeh
Star Contributor
Star Contributor
The UI part of the Office add-ins is all webscript based. In the source tree, look in remote-api / config / alfresco / templates / webscripts / org / alfresco / office.

It should be pretty easy to add thumbnails - look at the URLs to the images in Share (you'll need to remove the proxy part to access the Repository directly). You can create new thumbnail definitions to better fit the office UI, or just resize them in the HTML.

Thanks,
Mike

zbennett
Champ in-the-making
Champ in-the-making
Mike, you're a hero! Thanks much!