Hallo Guys Image may be NSFW.
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I need your advice.
We want to encourage our users (in their respective functional areas like HR, Communications, etc.) to create and maintain their own pages on the portal. We know about wiki's and WPC but believe me when I tell you that does not work with our users, it is way to much effort and not user-friendly enough. Keep in mind, this is a mine . . . . so the computer skills here strech as far as MS Office and bearly further.
We found something that could actually work: Word documents. Just bare with me. The process from a user perspective:
1. I (the user that works on a mine) create my page with pretty pictures, I can use any font or colour. Basically I can do whatever I feel like doing or having on my page.
(This is very important)
2. I create hyperlinks that point to the documents or URL's or whatever I can come up with.
(We will have to teach them this)
3. I save the document as a PDF
(This is where it gets tricky, will explain later)
4. I go to the portal, there is a special iView for me to upload my new version of the page
(this is how they will manage and update their own pages)
(We use a KM Document upload iView, can't remember the exact name. The upload path is fixed, the user cannot change anything, properties are hidden, basically all they see is the "browse" and "upload" button. If the document has the same name, it will overwrite the current one and hence the KM Document iView which displays the document gets updated)
I have to say, they actually create beautiful pages in Word.
The issue with PDF: It I can’t figure out a way for the hyperlinks inside the pdf to open in a new window/tab, some sort of Adobe limitation, everything opens in the same window. They need to be able to go back to the "main page/pdf" and choose to open another link. And some websites don't like to be put in iViews, like Google and SCN. So PDF is out (unless you have any ideas?)
XPS
Next we tried XPS (Save as XPS). This actually works quite well, the links open in a new page. I'm sure as many of you guys know, the TLN (top level navigation) and header takes up a lot of space already. The XPS viewer in IE has wasted grey space around the document. The document is fixed in size and position (centre). Grey space left right and top. Anyone know how to fix this? (The PDF stretched to the size of the iView, not ideal, but it was acceptable)
HTML
After that, we tried HTML (Save as Webpage). If you save a word document as a webpage, the layout gets messed up. We could avoid this by telling the users to work in Web/HTML View in Word when they create/update their page. The webpage then displays perfect in the iView with no wasted space, a nice size, left aligned, links open in a new window . . . . but . . . image files need to be uploaded separately from the HTML file . . . . so close . . . sigh . . .
SWF
My last hope was SWF (flash). But I'm unable to convert/save from doc to swf . .
Any ideas???? Would really appreciate the help, the pages look really nice and it's such an easy way to empower business to maintain their portal pages.
We are on NW 7.4
Regards
Antonette