Question

I am testing twiki with the idea to make it the knowledge portal of our company.

Since up to now all our documentation was MS Word based (and I guess even in future people would like to keep on writing doc files) I was looking for a way to translate MS word files into twiki, in an easy (comfortable for the user) way and with a good quality result.

I have found in internet different solutions (some of them pretty obsolete I guess: html2tml.pl, MsWordToTWikiMLAddOn, HTML-TWikiConverter) but none of them is really optimal: I do not manage to "see" the MsWordToTWikiMLAddOn in my installed plugins; html2tml.pl and HTML-TWikiConverter are unconfortable to use and the resulting twiki document is pretty much messed up (no tables, no pictures, sometimes "totally messed up") even if I have exported the .doc file into an "Webpage filtered".

Could you give me a good hint to solve this problem? I mean either a good "new" solution or a good hint to use properly the ones that I have already found. Please be detailed in your answer keeping in mind that I am a totaly newby in twiki i.e. some concept/terminology that for you is trivial might be totally unknown for me.

Thanks.

Environment

-- CatiaLavalle - 29 Aug 2007

Answer

MsWordToTWikiMLAddOn isn't a plugin (I guess that's why it's called an add-on ) and therefore doesn't show up on the list of installed plugins. It's a Visual Basic macro that has to be installed in Word and started from there (as described in the instructions of this add-on). It might not do what you want but it does quite a nice job translating properly formatted Word documents.

-- MartinKaufmann - 29 Aug 2007

Additionally, you might try to use the WYSIWYG editor (TinyMCEPlugin) and copy/paste from Word.

Another way could be, to use MsOfficeAttachmentsAsHTMLPlugin. Then, if you attach a Word file to a TWiki topic (=page), the topic will show the attached Word file converted to HTML instead. Note, that for editing you would edit the attached Word file and not the TWiki topic. Also, you would need an alternative search engine (like the SearchEngineKinoSearchAddOn) because TWiki does not index Word attachments by default.

I think I read that the people at TWIKI.NET will attempt to improve the MS Office integrtion

-- JosMaccabiani - 29 Aug 2007

A useful trick is often to open your Word document into a program more standards-abinding to "clean" it: Open Office, Abiword, and ... Google Docs! It thenm provides often a much better source to copy/paste into the WYSIWYG editor - or copy paste the exported HTML into a TWiki topic. You can also use a MS Word plugin to save in Open Office format.

Anyways, the trick is to find converters doing a fine job of simplifying the Word document, and copy paste from them

-- ColasNahaboo - 29 Aug 2007

-- CatiaLavalle - 30 Aug 2007

Thanks for your answers! I have tried with the "brute" copy/paste from word with the WYSIWYG editor (I will try with more clean up intermediate steps anyway). And the result is almost what I want. Two open points: 1) how to let twiky see the online figures (say the original doc file has some text and some figures in it: how to reproduce the same structure?) 2) In the WYSIWYG editor how to see which fornt is used/change fonts? (I am not talking about headers/formatted text I an talking about the font of the normal text)

-- CatiaLavalle - 30 Aug 2007

Catia, watch out for updates to the WysiwygPlugin and TinyMCEPlugin. They are in the middle of being further bugfixed and improved.

-- CrawfordCurrie - 31 Aug 2007

I am in exactly the same spot - we are currently checking twiki as an option for our new portal. As we have numerous MS Word documents we are trying to figure out the best way to streamline them into twiki.

There are a few open questions:

1. Quality of conversion (copy/paste to WYSIWYG of the MsWordToTWikiMLAddOn output has less than adequate results, but I will check if cleaning would help)
2. Images - I have installed the BatchUploadPlugin plugin but still the process is quite a pain
3. The ability to batch convert bunch of documents
4. Ideally, this batch conversion would translate directory tree structure into parent-child relationship in twiki.

I'm wondering how so many enterprises that have gone the twiki way, managed to workaround this problem: Didn't they import legacy documents whatsoever? And if they did so, weren't many of them MS Office users?

See also the discussion held in Open Office to Twiki Plugin, which seems to me somewhat more promising lead towards batch conversion of MS Word documents into Twiki.

-- EyalTeutsch - 20 Sep 2007

In my experience, there is no good-enough solution to MS migration.

We simply keep two systems; the folders of MS Word and TWiki. The results are pure endorsement of TWiki, of course.

Eyal, feel free to call me to 0547 565652 for more info.

-- YuvalAviel - 17 Oct 2007

I agree, I have worked this problem for quite some time. There are no really good MS Office content management frameworks that are open source. Plone/Zope seems to have the most promise of all solutions I have evaluated. The Plone/Zope content management framework mostly just follows the same vain here through; it uses various plugins written in the framework that try to render the source MS docs in html. The quality of this output depends on the quality of the conversion tool and the time you put in to configuring them.

My ultimate conclusions are that if you want a document management solution that utilizes these types of documents, you should probalby go with an Enterprise solution like MS Sharepoint. If you can't afford that and you are trying to deliver a solution for technicaly capable users, then twiki is great. The big challenge is to get users to switch out of the mindset of using Word and move all of their content into topics.

-- BryanEllsaesser - 18 Nov 2007

Closing this support question after more than 30 days of inactivity. Please feel free to re-open if needed.

-- PeterThoeny - 01 Jan 2008

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