Hi, we currently use the Microsoft SharePoint Services, to launch MS Word from a web application we have developed for our clients, to view, edit and save Word documents directly from the browser. Naturally, this only works with IE as a browser. For various reasons, our client wants to move to a different browser (Firefox and Chrome being the strongest preferences), so we are exploring ways to make Word document editing work with each one of those browsers. The client has a large number of document templates, which are stored as .docm files and they would like at a click of a button to load them into Word, edit the file and save it, which they are currently able to do from our application under IE. I have failed finding any info about an already existing way to do that in Chrome. Can someone advise if that is currently possible and if not, how difficult it would be to write a plugin to do the job and maybe some pointers about the best way to approach this. Thanks a lot for the help! I really appreciate it!

cheers
Rumen

You could open the file through Google docs, that's the only currently existing way I can think of.
I assume you call some sort of ActiveX control to load Word into IE? Afraid that's not possible in Chrome, or Firefox. If you want to do something that simple, you would probably first have to make a NPAPI dll that can load ActiveX controls and then load the control you need.

Really though, it'd work better if you wrote the whole editor rather than relying on Word. But it doesn't sound like that's really an option for you.

Thanks heaps for the prompt reply. Yes, we load an ActiveX object through the OpenDocuments class, defined in owsclt.dll, which comes with the standard MS Office distribution.
Writing a whole editor all together, would not be an immediate choice for us. I had a look at all te docs and specs about NPAPI and that is looking a bit more a way we may choose to go, unless we can not find a simpler solution.
Speaking of that, I bumped into an extension for both FF and Chrome, called IE Tab 2. Renders your page in FF or Chrome, using the IE engine. For a moment it looked like it was going to be the perfect solution, until it turned out it looses the Cookies when posting to a page that I want to be rendered in IE, so user needs to login again, which is pointless in my case. On the IE Tab2 forum for Chrome, there was a thread about that, with someone from the support team saying it was possible they can support in the future an optional transfer of cookies from the current browser, to the IE tab, although it was not an immediate priority. Do you know if anything has been done in that direction?

No I don't. Doesn't really seem like the best solution though since you wouldn't really be supporting those browsers, you'd just be running IE inside of those browsers. But if your client's willing to pay for something they could download for free anyway I guess it's your win. :T

Not quite. The client will be running the application in FF or Chrome and just open in IE tab only the page that launches the ActiveX component. With the add on, you can configure URLs which, when matched are automatically rendered with IE. That way, all other pages, but the one with the ActiveX control will be still rendered with FF or Chrome. I have tried that with ChromePlus, where they have got the cookie sharing between the browser and the IE tab working and it actually works well. The only problem is, that you can not POST to a page that is marked to automatically load in IE tab. Your POST is turned into a GET, loosing the request parameters. Anyway, thanks a lot for the input. I may look more seriously into the NPAPI option if not just to asses if that will work and how much effort it will be. Cheers!