views:

16

answers:

2

Hello,

We are going to develop a client-server application where all the office documents will be stored on the remote server. The problem is that users need to edit these docs very often. The standard solution is:

  1. download
  2. edit locally
  3. upload

But it is very inconvenient and would cause high traffic, cause docs are very large.

Is there any solution to edit documents right on server?

E.g. some remote OpenOffice installation which we can connect somehow?

Thanks in advance!

+1  A: 

Unless you can give your users RDP sessions on Windows or VNC (or X windows?) sessions on Linux you're going to be stuck with downloading the document to edit locally (in one form or another) then upload again.

There may be some HTTP/browser based solution but because it's HTTP you're going be to pulling all of the document back to the browser to edit then posting back to the server, it pretty much defeats the purpose.

Kev
A: 

As pointed out by Kev, one solution would be some sort of remote access software to access a copy of OpenOffice.org running on the server. There is for example a VNC viewer that will run as a Java applet in a browser (http://www.realvnc.com/support/javavncviewer.html ), that might do the trick.

Another option would be a server-based office package, a la Google docs. There are some available, but none with the full feature set of OpenOffice.org, so this is probably only an option if you can restrict to that feature set. If you can, it could work quite well.

sleske