与客户端PC上的MS Office通信

Question

I'm looking for a solution for communication with Office products in my web application. I have many clients who want to edit their documents at same the time. I've searched for a solution and I have two choices:

1. WOPI protocol which requires an Office Web Apps Server which is not a reachable option for me because it requires an expensive and powerful server to be able to serve that many clients. Besides, my web application is Java-based and my servers are running on Linux.

2. WebDAV protocol. This option seems better but I've heard Chrome and Firefox do not support it because WebDAV requires ActiveX and because of that every client must install a package on their PCs.

Can anyone help me make a correct decision? What is MS-FSSHTTP protocol? Does it meets my needs?

Answer 1

AFAIK, for WOPI, you do not need to have Office Web Apps Server installed for all clients. You can use WOPI integration using Office Online as a Office Cloud Storage Partner .

All you have to do is based on the document type, you have to redirect to corresponding Office URLs mentioned here on the WOPI discovery page .

From there onward, Office will invoke your WOPI end-points as per the defined specs and communicate with your server.

If your clients are business users and you want them to edit documents, then please read through this page WOPI business users .

Hope this helps.

Answer 2

If you know the users will have Office installed on their machine, then you can use WebDAV. Eg a combination of IT Hit Java Server with AJAX Library (to support all modern browsers and not only IE).

If users of your app don't have Office installed, then the answer is simply WOPI :

1) Either apply to become an Office Cloud Storage Partner to be able to use Microsoft's Office Online servers.

2) Or deploy an Office Online Server (formerly known as Office Web Apps) to a dedicated infrastructure. If you need to be able to serve large amount of users, you can deploy OOS to a web farm. Yes, you'll need a server running on Windows for that but the rest of your Java/Linux stack can remain unchanged.

MS-FSSHTTP is a protocol that is also known as Cobalt. You can perceive it as an extension that was required by WOPI in the past in order to support editing of certain document formats, such as Word. Technically, it's a protocol that allows for upload or download of file changes instead of uploading/downloading the whole file. It basically saves traffic.