Using Office Web Apps, Can you open a document via webdav?

Question

We're in the process of converting a legacy desktop application into a web enabled equivalent.

However one feature is causing difficulty, editing MS Word documents.

Current proposed solution is publishing the DOC and DOCX files via WebDAV and using a custom ActiveX component to launch WinWord and pointing it at a file via a URL.

This works but it's limited in scope and the worlds moved on since it was conceived.

Is is possible to use the new Office Web Apps to do this completely in-browser?

So, still publish DOC files via WebDAV, but only to a web server hosting the Office Web Apps and redirecting the user to a URL rather than launching a local windows exe via activex.

Can you do this with the new Office Web Apps? Where is the documentation on how to achieve this?

Answer 1

Yes, you can launch editing of MS Office documents from a web browser, using the sharepoint dll available in IE:

Eg

Set EditDocumentButton = CreateObject("SharePoint.OpenDocuments.3")
strDocument = 'http://localhost:8080' + strDocument; 
EditDocumentButton.EditDocument(strDocument)

If your server is running java you can use Milton (http://milton.io) to integrate directly into your business app and edit the document in place.