OpenOffice service installation and usage thereof

[mruflin]

I'm currently struggling through all the configuration and installation files of different Alfresco 1.3.x versions. One of the things I still can't put together is the OpenOffice service integration. I hope you can clarify some points

(I'm talking about Windows installation here)

As I understood, OO has to run all the time in order to listen to Alfresco requests. Now, in all editions of 1.3.x (community/enterprise) you start OO "Service" by executing the start_oo.bat file, which means soffice is started in User mode, which in turn means that it gets killed when the user logs off.

From others (not verified thought!) I heard that document information extraction still works when the user is logged out, which leaves me now somehow puzzled…

Does this mean that
a) Alfresco somehow restarts OO when it needs it (unlikely),
b) Alfresco doesn't use OO for most tasks (my guess),
c) Some other "magic" thing happens?

Not really believing in magic, I passed some time to install PortableOpenOffice.exe as a service. Everything works fine now, OO now survives user logoff's. But now I start to doubt whether I really have to start OO as a service or not… (Especially given that you call the start script in the enterprise edition "Start OpenOffice service")


Related to this question are some others (justifying this forum section ;-)):

- When exactly does Alfresco use the OpenOffice service?

- Where exactly is it bound to the rest of Alfresco? (I'm talking here about the SpringContext). Would it be possible to completely remove OO dependency? (Just curious, I'm a developer :-))

Thanks a lot,

Michael

[mruflin]

Ok, I answer some of my questions myself…

Alfresco uses OpenOffice to extract information from Documents as well as to convert documents from one format to another (e.g. pdf). It is an integral part of the application, removing it makes therefore not much sense…

OpenOffice HAS to run all the time - which is not the case in the Windows installer, as OpenOffice is NOT installed as a service. The label of OpenOffice "Start as Service" is therefore in this regards misleading.

To install OpenOffice as a service, other means, for example srvany.exe (http://support.microsoft.com/kb/137890/EN-US/), have to be used. I might add more information regarding this at a later moment.

[paulhh]

Hi

There is a boot step that can call out to run an OS command - when I played with calling OpenOffice via that on Windows, I never got OOo to stay running in the background.  Maybe someone with more batch/script/win knowledge can get that route working.  Another option might be OpenOfficePortable, which has some options for how OOo is run (I was going to try this approach again, since it was a while since I last tried).  I'll try and dig out the details of the boot call out.

Cheers
Paul.

[paulhh]

org.alfresco.util.exec.RuntimeExecBootstrapBean
org.alfresco.util.exec.RuntimeExecShutdownBean

Need to set the "startupCommands" property with a list of RuntimeExec instances.

The bean has to go in the bootstrap-context.xml file.

Paul.