Publishing Content with Microsoft Word

The Manifest Way.

This simple process is illustrated by this step-by-step tutorial with screen shots of an actual document being saved. There is an alternative interface where a familiar drag and drop from your desktop can upload thousands of documents in a single operation. The in-MSWord interface is especially convenient though to create/edit and save/replace individual files.

Step 1

To save your document to Manifest, press the Save to Manifest button, a login dialog box will appear as shown above. Type your user name and password in the appropriate fields and press the login button.

Step 2

If you have used a valid username and password a dialog box appears showing a series of folders and documents, this is a visual representation of your Manifest database repository. You will notice that there is a field, circled in red on this illustration (figure 2), where you can type the name of the document you are saving. This friendly interface is designed to look and feel like any familiar save file dialog.

Once you have entered the name for your document you choose the place you would like to save it in the database by double clicking on the appropriate folder. We will use the circled folder but your folder structure will be unique to your organisation and you can use any folder you have been given permission to save documents to.

Step 3

The contents of that folder is now displayed and we can save our document inside it by pressing the circled Save button.(figure 3)

We Are Done!

Your job as a publisher is now finished. Manifest converts the document to XML and uploads it to the database along with a copy of the original Word document. You will see the progress bar moving to indicate that the file is being processed. Depending on how the administrator has set the properties of the folder the document is being saved to, it will either be automatically published to a Web page, or be available for the administrator to manually assign to a web page depending on approval processes etc. When the processing has finished you can save a local copy or safely delete the document from your local computer knowing that there is a copy stored in the Manifest repository.

Here is the resultant Web page automatically formatted by the desired style sheet, in this case a Manifest site style sheet. Yours will use a style sheet for your organisation.

• Metadata and other non-viewable information stored in the original Word document are automatically included.

• Images are automatically converted to web friendly formats like JPEG, PNG, or GIF.

• Alt text can be included on any image, and can even be enforced!

• Hyperlinks are automatically resolved to be relative or absolute.

• Email addresses are automatically converted to the correct web format

• Tables, hyperlinks on images, list numbers, outline numbers, list bullets, footnotes, endnotes, comments, sections, and more.

• In short, everything is done for you.

Of course your already published documents can always be retrieved directly into Microsoft word too, making editing your website a very simple task indeed.

Congratulations, you now know all you need to save or replace documents to the Manifest repository from Microsoft Word.

Summary Notes

Everyone in your organisation that writes documents for the Intranet or Internet should have a copy of, at least one, Manifest Word template available on their computer. In fact, this template should become the default for any documents created within the organisation.

By assigning styles from this template, such as heading and dot point, the styles in the original Word document will map directly and consistently to the style sheet that displays these documents on the web.

This means that if you want your document to display correctly on the web you need to use the appropriate Word styles

Once created, a Word document is added to the system by uploading it to the database. This is achieved by using the Save to Manifest button in the Manifest toolbar. This toolbar is located in the Word toolbar area.

The publisher simply opens the Word document and presses the Save to Manifest button. This opens a dialogue box displaying a series of folders, representing the contents of the database, and the publisher can choose to save the document in any of these folders that they have been given permission to use.

The document is now in the system and depending on the options that the administrator has set for the folder that the document is saved to, it may be published automatically to the web site, or it may need to be physically dragged and dropped to the appropriate page by the administrator.