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MOSS 2007: Configure Document Conversion for your server 

Author: Tobias Zimmergren
Url:
http://www.zimmergren.net

I recently bumped into a challenge where I had to make it possible for people to convert their Word, Excel, InfoPath or other documents to a web page for display in your SharePoint 2007 installation. After a few minutes of informationgathering I realized that i could actually make it very simple for myself by using the Document Conversion functionality offered by Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 Enterprise.

Below is a step by step instruction on how to configure and enable Document Conversion as well as how you will publish and convert a document from e.g. Microsoft Office Word 2007.

Configuring Document Conversion

  1. Navigate to Central Administration of your SharePoint installation
  2. Click on the tab called Operations
  3. Locate the section Topology And Services and click Services On Server
  4. Start the following two services:
    1. Document Conversions Load Balancer Service
    2. Document Conversions Launcher Service
  5. Choose a load-balancing server and finally set a port-number it should run on.
  6. Click OK - It should state that the services are Started
    documentconversion1
  7. Navigate to the Application Management tab
  8. Locate the section called External Service Connections and click Document conversions
  9. Choose to enable conversion for this site
  10. Choose a load-balancing server
    documentconversion2
  11. Click OK

Convert a document to a Web Page

  1. Launch e.g. Microsoft Office Word 2007
  2. Either choose to create a new document and fill it with some information, or open an existing one
  3. Publish it to a Document Library of your likings by choosing:
    1. The big round Office-button
    2. Publish
    3. Document management server
      documentconversion3

    4. Enter your portal url: e.g. http://moss-portal/, hit enter, then use the interface to navigate to a Document Library
      documentconversion4
      1. Save document and Exit Microsoft Office Word 2007
  4. Navigate to your Document Library
  5. Choose Convert Document in the drop down
  6. Choose From Work Document to WebPage
    documentconversion5

  7. Enter a title of the page
    documentconversion6
  8. Click Create

Viola! You should now have a newly generated .aspx page published on your site, created from the Word document you chose.

documentconversion7

Thanks for your time.
Cheers

 
Posted on 13-Sep-07 by Zimmergren
6 Comments  |  Trackback Url  |  Link to this post | Bookmark this post with:        
Tags: MOSS 2007
 

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Thursday, 23 Oct 2008 03:45 by Marcel
@Tobias Zimmergren It works but we have a problem: If we convert a document that contains headlines like "1. some text", "1.1 some other text", "1.1.1 text" (this are examples) all this headlines will be converted to "some text", "some other text" and "text". The numbering is getting lost! Did you note such behavior by now? Could it be a bug? Thanks!

Friday, 9 Jan 2009 02:36 by Nathan
This is all well and good, but I can't actually perform the conversion because of an error: The converter framework returned the following error: CE_BACKENDUNAVAILABLE Some blogs say this happens when you run try to perform the conversion from a site on a server that is the Domain Controller, but this is not the case for me. Any help/info would be greatly appreciated.

Friday, 9 Jan 2009 04:36 by Nathan
Sorry for the re-post, I refreshed the page after posting in order to post this Answer to my problem, but it re-submitted the original comment. What I actually wanted to post was that I fixed my problem by restarting the Load Balancer and Launcher services for Document Conversion. This is done from Central Administration > Operations > Services on Server.

Friday, 9 Jan 2009 04:38 by Nathan
Make sure you start the Launcher service AFTER starting the Load Balancer service.

Thursday, 26 Feb 2009 10:22 by Lisa
I can convert documents as the farm admin but my users with full control can not. On my test farm they can. Not sure what is different between the two. As far as I know all the settings are the same. Could it be a bug? If so, is there a known fix?

Thursday, 21 May 2009 10:05 by Mike
If you have a medium server farm, 2 WFE's and 1 Index, where do you start the Document Conversion and load balancer?

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