Strategic help needed?

HCL Domino Domino Forum
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Hello experts.

I’m wondering about if there really is a good editor (text) that works fine in Notes and Web. I’m aware of the Java Editor Applet, different HTML Area editors, and Active-X solutions, but have difficult to take a strategic descision between them.

The current situation is that my customer has loads of Notes databases, loads of documents and loads of document links between documents in different databases. Now they want to migrate everything to the Web.

Here are som basic functionality that have been raised by the client;

  • default font and sizes

  • ability to easy maintain document links between documents.

  • interface to an image repository.

  • integration with MS Office.

  • WYSIWYG editing.

  • Spell-checker (different languages)

  • Ability to read content in Notes client as well, since some user may keep the Notes client.

  • etc…

Have anybody gone through this before (I bet) and what did you recommend your customer?

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Subject: Strategic help needed?

more html discussions & peoples

http://www.codestore.net/store.nsf/unid/BLOG-20050209/

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Subject: Strategic help needed?

There are actually different issues raised. The first is which rich text editor you want to use for the web. Some good ones include htmlArea, with which you seem familiar, FCKEditor and eWebEditPro. (A more comprehensive list is available on our web editors page) Find the one that makes sense for you in terms of usability, functionality (e.g., spell checking) and cost (some are free and some, like eWebEditPro, cost something).

The second issue is integration with the Notes rich text editor. That is tougher. There are some very crude methods that will work by tricking the editor to see the HTML as MIME, but they are neither scalable nor robust. Another solution, although pricier, is to use our new CoexEdit tool, which automatically converts between HTML and rich text and is made to integrate with various rich text editors. Mind you, if you wanted web only apps, you wouldn’t need such a product, but if you want people to edit from both Notes and the web, you probably do., CoexEdit is in beta, but will be released shortly, and it uses technology which has been available for the past couple of years in our popular Midas Rich Text LSX engine, but which has been enhanced for this purpose. If you would like to give it a test run, contact me (see contact info) and I’ll get you included.

The third issue is really Office integration, whether Microsoft Office or Open Office. You can either make that integration work from Notes rich text, or find a web editor that integrates well. I would suggest that the latter may be easier, but I have less experience in that regard.

Oh yes, another place to check for additional information is http://codestore.net where Jake Howlett has discussed this a few different times. He has a good integration with htmlArea, although he runs into the same kludges with the notes/web integration that I mention above.

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Subject: RE: Strategic help needed?

Thank you for your reply.

I will contact you about testing CoexEdit, but firstly I need to know more about the ActiveX track. This is the track I know least of, and if I have a guess, it could be interesting in terms of MS Office integration.

Anyone with knowledge of ActiveX in this context?

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Subject: RE: Strategic help needed?

The ActiveX is just the web editor. For example, we work with the DHTML edit control from Microsoft that is used by a number of other web editors indirectly. It is free and comes with Internet Explorer, and there are a couple of samples in the Sandbox which show how to use it. It is good with tables and fonts and such, but does not have a good answer for image handling.