[Building Sakai] possible to preview word doc in CLE?

[Matthew Jones]

This is functionality that could for sure be developed.
There were two versions of the Sakai OAE preview processor. An older ruby
script [1] that would pull new documents when they were uploaded from the
server, use Open/Libre Office (on some machine, that was slightly difficult
to get running [2]) and post back preview images. These preview images
would be displayed by the UX.

There was a newer preview processor that also needed Open Office but was
written in Java and listened for events posted by the server. [3]

Sakai CLE currently passes events with the ClusterEventService which is
pretty inefficient and would require linking up some service like this to
the database, or having some rest endpoint provide the new documents in the
system (as the old ruby method did). Then you'd have to have someone build
in the UI for displaying the previews into the resources tool. Neither of
these would be a trivial task and something that made OAE really cool.

At this point you'd have to weigh the cost of this (developing a processor,
possibly switching the event processing to MQ, and integrating preview and
sending documents into the Resources tool) against something like an
integration with Crocodoc (which would also give collaboration/markup) or
Scrib/Google Drive.

[1] https://github.com/sakaiproject/nakamura/tree/master/scripts
[2]
https://confluence.sakaiproject.org/pages/viewpage.action?pageId=75667933
[3] https://github.com/sakaiproject/preview-processor

On Mon, Jan 28, 2013 at 7:47 PM, Keli Sato Amann <kamann at stanford.edu>wrote:

> Hello,
> One of the nice features of the OAE is the ability to preview Word
> documents without downloading it.  I'm sure this is a naive question, but
> I'm curious if this is possible to implement in the CLE? It might be nice
> to have in a grading interface for either Assignments or SAMigo (Please
> don't read anything into this question in terms of committing to doing it!)
> or to have it in Resources.
>
> Keli Amann
> User Experience Specialist
> Stanford University, Academic Computing Services
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