Steve's TS2 Insider

Q: (from Bryan)

We've installed Sharepoint Services 3.0 SP1 on one of our servers.  We'd like to host some shared Word 2003 documents on a WSS 3.0 site but not all users of the site will have Microsoft Word or Microsoft Word viewer installed on their client machines from which they'll be accessing the site and viewing the documents.

We came upon a feature of Sharepoint Services 2.0 that allows one to setup an Office HTML Viewer service.  The HTML viewer service allows site visitors to view the host Word documents as HTML by converting the Word documents to HTML on the fly.  This same HTML Viewer service capability appears to exist in WSS 3.0 SP1 as well.  The screen for configuring the HTML Viewer in WSS 3.0 is found in the WSS Central Administration under the External Service Connections section of the Application Management tab.

This HTML Viewer service sounds like an ideal solution for our application and needs.  However, we've been able to find very little information on Microsoft's website or elsewhere on how to acquire the HTML Viewer service installation package for WSS 3.0 let alone install and setup the HTML Viewer service for use with WSS 3.0.

A:

The short answer is “no” the HTML Viewer Service is not supported in WSS 3.0 for several reasons:

1. Properly implemented, the HTML Viewer Service required another physical box to do the conversions on-the-fly
2. The service was never upgraded to support 2007 Office
3. The 2003 Office viewer had a security vulnerability  and was pulled from our download site

It appears the best solution is to convert the documents to a public format (PDF or XPS) before posting on the website. Here are links to the office converters.

http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?familyid=CF196DF0-70E5-4595-8A98-370278F40C57&displaylang=en

http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?familyid=941b3470-3ae9-4aee-8f43-c6bb74cd1466&displaylang=en