Chapter 13

Word Processing on the Web

CONTENTS

• Integrating the Word Processor and the Intranet
• Setting Up the Web Server for Word Processor Integration
• Adding Word Processing Documents to Your Web Server
• Setting Up Microsoft Word as a Helper Application on the Client
• Setting Up Write, WordPad, and Other Word Processors as Helper Applications
• Free Read-Only Viewers
• Summary

Your word processing software is probably one of the most frequently used packages in your organization. People use it for everything from quick notes to complex, book-length documents. In this chapter, you'll learn how to set up your Intranet so that your customers can retrieve documents using their Web browser and automatically display them in their favorite word processor for revision, document assembly, or other purposes.

The chapter is organized into separate, but similar, sections devoted to Mosaic, Netscape, Word, and Windows WordPad (for Windows 95 users, or Windows Write for Windows 3.1 users). Word was chosen due to its prevalence (as a component of Microsoft Office, it can be found in nearly every workplace in America); WordPad was chosen due to the fact that it is free with Windows NT and Windows 95.

The examples in this chapter use Mosaic and Netscape-two of the most widely used Web browsers for Windows. Each section contains several screenshots, showing you step-by-step how to set up your word processor as a Web browser helper application.

If you are feeling disappointed that I didn't list your favorite application, please bear in mind that the same concepts are easily applied to just about any word processor and any Web browser you can imagine. If your organization uses multiple packages for word processing, you'll be able to get everything you need out of the separate examples to enable you to fully customize your own Intranet.

Integrating the Word Processor and the Intranet

Like most people who use computers for general office work, you probably use your word processing package more than any other application. Graphical user interfaces like Microsoft Windows integrate your word processor, along with all your other commonly used applications, into your everyday desktop allowing you to start it up with a simple mouse click.

Integrating the word processor (and other applications, as you'll learn in the next few chapters) into your Web is, in a sense, creating a whole new graphical interface for your users based on the Web browser. Some people have predicted that an overall graphical user interface based on Netscape or Explorer may eventually replace Microsoft Windows or the Macintosh desktop. Although this prediction may seem a bit farfetched, it is nonetheless both possible and simple to broaden the scope of your Web browser to tie in links to your everyday tools like your word processor, giving them a new interface with a common look and feel.

More importantly, you can use your Web server, HTML, and other tools to put together shareable libraries of word processing documents. Such libraries can be complete with searchable indices and point-and-click access through your Web browser. Locating and opening a document no longer involves finding a file and then starting up your word processor to read or edit it. Using Explorer, Netscape, or another Web browser, your customers can click a Web hyperlink for the document and have the word processor fire up with a copy of the desired document loaded.

Helper Applications

Earlier chapters talked about helper applications (also known as external viewers), which are computer programs your Web browser uses when it can't directly display the data represented by a hyperlink. For example, neither Netscape nor Explorer can play all the audio or video file formats that you might run across on the Web, but both can be set up to pass incoming audio or video data off to an audio- or video-playing helper application. When you click a hyperlink pointing to a sound or video file, your Web browser receives it from a Web server, recognizes it as a sound or video file, and hands it off to the audio or video helper application you've set up.

In this chapter, your word processor is treated as a helper application, just like a sound or video player. There's very little difference between the setup of one of these common helper applications and the setup of Word or WordPerfect, but there's a major difference in the implications of doing so. Playing video and audio on your computer may be remarkable and enjoyable, but, unless you are in the video or audio business, it accomplishes little of your substantive, everyday work. Your word processor, on the other hand, is the workhorse of many days. Integrating it into your Intranet can potentially be a major productivity enhancement that fundamentally changes the way your customers do their work.

Setting Up the Web Server for Word Processor Integration

Regardless of which word processor you use, your first steps in setting it up as a helper application involve configuring your Web server to know about your word processor's documents. With small differences, which will be explained, the instructions in this section apply to any word processor.

As you learned in Chapter 12, "MIME and Helper Applications," Web servers use the MIME mechanism to identify documents according to their MIME data type/subtype. Recall that the MIME mechanism divides data into a relatively small handful of data types, with each type further subdivided into subtypes. Word processing documents fall into the application data type. You also learned in Chapter 12 how Web servers use filename extensions to map data files on the server to a MIME data type/subtype. IIS associates filename extensions with MIME types/subtypes through the Windows NT Registry.

Editing the Registry MIME Map

As you'll recall from Chapter 12, the NT Registry holds the IIS MIME map under the follow-ing key:

HKEY_LOCAL_MAchINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Services\InetInfo\Parameters\MimeMap

The key holds a simple list of MIME types/subtypes and associated filename extensions. (See Chapter 6, "Windows NT 4 Configuration" for some tips about how to steer a course through the Registry.) The following is a short excerpt from the default map distributed with IIS 1.0. (For a full listing, refer to the RegEdit program.)

application/envoy,evy,,5
application/mac-binhex40,hqx,,4
application/msword,doc,,5
application/msword,dot,,5

This list shows the association, for example, between the .doc filename extension and the MIME type/subtype application/msword, representing Microsoft Word. Recall that the last number on each row is the Gopher data type. Several of the IIS default MIME entries have no numbers for the Gopher type; you can add these numbers as required.

If you plan to use Microsoft Word on your Intranet, and if you plan to keep the default file extension of .doc for all your Word documents, you are already set because IIS installs the Word MIME key automatically. However, to set up your Web server for other word processors, you'll need to make appropriate changes to the Registry.

As you can see in the preceding Registry excerpt, IIS also installs the .dot extension for Word document templates. If you need to use more than one file extension per application, IIS will expect them to appear on separate lines in the Registry. Normally, Word uses the filename extension .doc, although you can use anything you like. Early versions of WordPerfect had no default filename extension, but the latest releases use .wpd. If your customers are running WordPerfect, you may need to use both .wpd and one or more of your own choosing for backward compatibility.

There is also a ready-made entry for another word processor I'll talk about later in this chapter, Windows Write (for your Windows for Workgroups customers) or Windows WordPad (for your customers running Windows 95 and Windows NT 4). The following is the IIS MIME entry for .wri files:

application/x-mswrite,wri,,5

When you're finished editing the MIME map in RegEdit, just close the application.

Implementing Changes in the MIME Map

Because you've changed the configuration of your Web server by editing one of its setup files, you now need to make the server aware of your changes. If your server isn't already running, it will read the changes as part of its normal start-up procedure. If IIS is already running, you can have it reread its configuration files by stopping and restarting the WWW Publishing Service. You can do this through the Internet Services Manager or through the Services icon in Control Panel.

Adding Word Processing Documents to Your Web Server

If you followed along in the preceding sections of this chapter, you've finished setting up your Web server to properly identify and serve your word processor's documents. Your next step is to populate your server with some documents.

You can transfer your documents to your Web server by using your network shared/mapped drives, FTP in binary mode, or floppy disks. Whichever method you use, it's probably a good idea to put the documents in a dedicated directory for word processing documents. If you use more than one word processor, create a separate server directory for each. After you've created these directories, you'll need to create some sort of HTML listing of them. This listing can be as simple or as complex as you like because including hyperlinks to word processing documents is exactly the same as setting up links to other kinds of documents. Using Microsoft Word as an example, a simple HTML listing might be something like the following:

<HTML>
<HEAD>
<TITLE>Word Documents</TITLE>
</HEAD>
<BODY>
<H1>Microsoft Word Documents</H1>
This directory contains a set of Word Documents. 
Just click on one to open it up in Word.<P>
<UL>
<LI><A HREF="health.doc">Document 1</A>, 
Memo about Health Insurance</LI>
<LI><A HREF="holiday.doc">Document 2</A>, 
Holiday Schedule</LI>
<LI><A HREF="usedfurn.doc">Document 3</A>, 
Used Office Furniture Inventory</LI>
</UL>
If you haven't already done so, you must set up your Web browser 
to understand Word documents. 
<A HREF="word_setup.html">Here are instructions.</A>
</BODY>
</HTML>

This code appears on the accompanying CD-ROM as the file Word Documents.htm. The code can be modified easily to use another word processor's documents. Figure 13.1 shows this HTML code rendered in ncSA Mosaic. As you can see, it looks like just any other Web page. Users with properly set up Web browsers can click the hyperlinks to run Word (or whatever word processor you've set up) with a copy of the selected document. Before you can use this page to load the hyperlinked Word documents, however, your Web browser must be set up to use your specific word processor as a helper application.

Figure 13.1: The HTML page for Word documents as it will appear in Mosaic.

Setting Up Microsoft Word as a Helper Application on the Client

Now that you have set up your Web server to know about Word documents and populated it with some data files from the package, your next step is to set up Word as a helper application. The concept of setting up helper applications for Web browsers is a general one, but the steps for doing it differ among browsers. The following sections go through the steps for ncSA Mosaic and Netscape. If you're using another browser, you may need to take a look at its documentation to find out how to do this procedure.

ncSA Mosaic 2.x and Word for Windows

ncSA Mosaic provides a graphical interface for setting up helper applications, although Mosaic uses the term external viewer rather than helper application. In Mosaic, open the Options menu, and then select Preferences. The Preferences dialog box opens. Click the Viewers tab.

As you can see in Figure 13.2, there are four fill-in boxes and several buttons that enable you to control external viewers. Figure 13.2 shows the dialog box already filled in for the Microsoft WAVE audio player.

Figure 13.2: The Mosaic Viewers dialog is used to configure MIME types.

The top box, Associate MIME Type of, contains a MIME data type/subtype pair-in this case audio/wav. The second fill-in box is an optional description of the kind of data file; in this example, it's Audio File - Microsoft WAVE. The third fill-in box, With this/these extensions, contains the same information as the filename-extension information in the IIS MIME map in the Registry. The last fill-in box, To this application, is where you specify which program will function as your helper application. In Figure 13.2, the special keyword internal is used in this box to indicate that Mosaic can handle this MIME type/subtype by itself, without a helper application. Note the Browse button next to this box; you'll be using it to set up Microsoft Word as your helper application.

Now that your tour of the Viewers tab is complete, it's time to configure Microsoft Word as your helper application. Click the Add button to open up the Add Viewer dialog box shown in Figure 13.3. This box has the same four fill-in boxes as Figure 13.2, but they're blank (initially) so you can enter your own information. Knowing what you now know about Figure 13.2 and the MIME map in the Registry (from Chapter 12), you can quickly fill in these blanks:

• In the Associate MIME Type of box, enter application/msword.
• In the Description of MIME Type (Optional) box, enter something like Microsoft Word Document. Note that you're not required to enter anything in this box, although it's a good idea if you do so for future reference.
• In the With this/these extensions box, enter doc wrd. (Mosaic and Netscape, unlike IIS, can handle multiple extensions per row for the same data type.)
• Finally, in the To This Application box, enter the full drive and pathname to the Microsoft Word executable program. If you're not sure about this pathname, click the Browse button to locate the executable program you want. When you've found it, select it.

Figure 13.3: Adding a viewer.

Click the Add button to save your changes. You're now ready to try out your new setup. Close the Preferences dialog box by clicking OK, and then select Open Document from the Mosaic File menu. Enter the URL of a Word document on your Web server. Mosaic contacts the Web server and asks for the document. As described in detail in Chapter 12, the server sends back header information identifying the document as the MIME type/subtype application/msword. Mosaic reads this information, and then passes the incoming document off to Word for viewing, dynamically starting up Word with a copy of the document. At this point, you have all the features and power of Word available to you to edit, save, and print the document.

Netscape Navigator 2.x and Word for Windows

Netscape on Microsoft Windows provides a graphical interface for setting up helper applications. Open the Options menu, and then select General Preferences. The Preferences dialog box appears. Click the Helpers tab (shown in Figure 13.4).

Figure 13.4: The Netscape Helpers dialog is used to configure MIME types.

Figure 13.4 shows the scrollable File type list that contains preset helper applications; clicking one of them displays some details of the setup. In Figure 13.4, the audio/x-wav file type has been selected. The File type window should remind you of the contents of the MIME map on your Web server, with its columns specifying MIME data types/subtypes (on the left) and filename extensions (on the right).

Below the File type window, you'll see File / MIME Type, with Subtype on the next line. Below that, there's a fill-in File Extensions box. In Figure 13.4, the File / MIME Type item is filled in as audio and the subtype filled in as x-wav. The File Extensions box contains wav.

At the bottom of the dialog, there are several option buttons that enable you to choose what to do with incoming data of the MIME type/subtype application/x-wav. In Figure 13.4, Launch the Application is selected. The bottom-most box is where you enter the name and path of the program that you want to function as your helper application. In Figure 13.4, the drive and path to the Microsoft Windows Media Player application, mplay32.exe, is filled in. Notice Netscape has picked up the Windows icon for mplay32, displaying it just to the left of the box.

To configure Microsoft Word as your helper application, click the Create New Type button in the Helpers tab to open up the Configure New Mime Type dialog box. This box has two fill-in boxes for your information about the new MIME type/subtype. In Figure 13.5, the information for Word has been filled in just like in the MIME map used by IIS.

Figure 13.5: The Configure New Mime Type dialog is used to add Word as a Netscape helper.

Fill in your information, and then click OK. You are returned to the Helpers tab with the MIME type information you just entered filled in. You now need to enter doc and wrd in the File Extensions box. Finally, click the Launch the Application option button and fill in the full drive and pathname to the Microsoft Word executable program. If you're not sure about this pathname, click the Browse button to locate the executable you want. When you've found it, select it. Notice that in Figure 13.6, Netscape has located and displayed the Word icon.

Figure 13.6: The Netscape Helpers dialog after Word has been added.

Figure 13.6 shows the Helpers tab filled in with Microsoft Word information. (Your drive and path to the Word executable program may be different than the one shown, so make sure you locate yours rather than just copying what's shown in the figure.) After you fill in all the information for your helper application, click OK to save your changes.

You're now ready to try out your new setup. Close the Preferences windows by clicking OK, and then click the Open button on Netscape's toolbar. Enter the URL of a Word document on your Web server. Netscape contacts the Web server and asks for the document. As described in Chapter 12, the server sends back header information identifying the document as the MIME type/subtype application/msword. Netscape reads this information, and then passes the incoming document off to Word for viewing, dynamically starting up Word with a copy of the document. At this point, you have added the power of Word into Netscape and you can edit, save, and print documents retrieved through the Intranet. Just remember, the documents are only local copies.

Setting Up Write, WordPad, and Other Word Processors as Helper Applications

The earlier procedures in this chapter described how to set up your Web server to know about Word documents and how to populate the Web server with some data files from Word; you can do the exact same procedures to use Windows Write (or WordPad) as a helper application. The steps are exactly the same except that you will use the MIME type/subtype of application/mswrite rather than application/msword, and you will change the file extension in the server MIME map from doc to wri. As discussed previously, you don't have to perform that last step following an installation of IIS. However, if you are using another Web server, you'll want to check its MIME map documentation to determine for yourself if it, too, is preconfigured for Word, WordPad, and Write. (If it's a Windows NT commercial Web server, it will probably already have Word, WordPad, Write, and dozens of other common office applications listed in its MIME map.)

The concept of setting up Write or WordPad as helper applications for Web browsers is also a general one. The exact steps differ only slightly depending on the Web browser you're using. Because I have already gone through the steps for Netscape and Mosaic, with screenshots from each browser, I'll avoid repeating myself here.

You should be able to use the general principles described in this chapter to set up other word processing packages as helper applications. As each of the previous sections has shown, the major steps in this process are as follows:

1. Add entries to the MIME map in the Registry on your Web server for your word processor's data files.
2. Place some word processor documents on your Web server.
3. Provide an HTML page on the Web server that references those documents using hyperlinks. Of course, your customers need to know the URL of that HTML page if it will lead them to the documents they seek.
4. Configure the word processor on the client computers as a helper application for your Web browser using the fill-in screens shown in this chapter.

Free Read-Only Viewers

Although I mentioned in Chapter 3, "The Software Tools to Build a Web," that some word processors can read documents created in others, and that many use RTF (Rich Text Format) as a means of converting documents from one format to another, the problem of dealing with foreign word processor documents (that is, documents created by word processing packages other than your own) is a perennial one. Each of the three major word processor manufacturers, Microsoft, WordPerfect, and Adobe's Frame Technologies, have made available free read-only viewers for their documents. These viewers include the following:

• Microsoft's Word Viewer for Windows, available on the CD and at the URL:
  http://www.microsoft.com/msword/fs_wd.htm
• Envoy for WordPerfect on Windows, available at the following URL:
  http://wp.novell.com/busapps/win/tocen10w.htm
• Frame Reader versions for UNIX, Windows, and Macintosh are available in separate directories at the following FTP site:
  ftp://ftp.frame.com/pub/techsup/product_updates

Each of these packages reads and displays documents created by their associated word processor. You need not own the particular word processor with which these viewers are associated to use them. Although you cannot edit documents in these programs, you can save and print documents.

Although these packages work in stand-alone mode for viewing documents, you can also set them up as Web browser helper applications. In other words, you can set up your Intranet Web server to know about each of the formats, and then provide the read-only viewers to your customers instead of the full applications. That way, customers can view all the available documents regardless of whether they have the correct word processor.

Helper application setup for the viewers is exactly the same as the setup for word processors described in this chapter. Just substitute the read-only viewer as the executable program to be launched based on the MIME type/subtype of the documents.

Summary

This chapter has focused on setting up your Intranet to use common office word processors as Web helper applications. Using the information in this chapter, you can set up libraries of documents in your own word processor file format and make them available on your Web. Your customers can use their Web browsers to locate documents in the library, and then start up their word processors by clicking a Web hyperlink. Specifically, this chapter has covered the following topics within discussions of each of several major word processors and browsers:

• The importance of being able to retrieve documents directly into your word processor using a Web browser
• Configuration of your World Wide Web server software to understand your word processor's document files
• Configuration of your World Wide Web browser software to handle word processor documents, including viewing foreign word processor documents
• Potential uses of these capabilities

Chapter 14, "Publishing Spreadsheets on the Intranet," covers office spreadsheet packages, showing you specifically how to set up Microsoft Excel to function as a Web browser helper application. The concepts presented apply just as easily to Lotus 1-2-3 or any other spreadsheet.