Real world example: Shredding Office documents and storing in a backend database

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I've been receiving various e-mails from folks showing solutions they are building on top of the existing Office XML support, and I wanted to start posting some of these examples. Today, I wanted to post an e-mail I received from Robert Nederby who works for Coextant. They've built a solution that shows the flexibility you have once you are able to get the XML representation of a document. They break documents down based on the structure of the document and then store those pieces in a database. This then makes it easier to automatically generate content for consumers.

Here's the description that Robert sent me in e-mail (thanks Robert):

Automated Office/XML transformation

Coextant - an international Microsoft ISV / Information Worker partner - is the exclusive provider of Hyper.Net Content Integration & Transformation software.

The Hyper.Net server process monitor events in document libraries (eg file server or SharePoint Document Library) and transforms documents into relational data stored in SQL as well-formed topic-oriented xml, html, watermarked PDF etc. In the transformation process Hyper.Net analyse the documents, breaks them down into XML-based relational data, creating hypertext topic, table of content, hyperlink, thumbnails images, metadata mapping and generates multiple web-ready deployment formats.

Key for Coextants work is to leverage existing Office skills/investments, shelter users from technology and to automate all processes related to publishing and maintaining content-intensive web sites, making sure the right content is available to the right people, on the right sites, in the right formats ......

Hyper.Net is based on Office 2003 and Microsoft.Net, and is highly configurable and custimizable to meet specific publishing requirements.

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If anyone else has a solution they've built using the XML support in existing versions of Office, let me know. I'd love to hear about it.

-Brian