Direct editing of Microsoft Office files on the server (Plone)

Question

Is the following behavior possible (using some features of Microsoft Office not very well known by a Linux guy)

• Upload Microsoft Excel (or some other office file in Plone) as File content type

• Save

• When you click the file next time it opens directly in Microsoft Excel

• When pressing Save in Excel it directly updates the file on the server, not the local temporary copy

I think Microsoft Office provides some APIs to do things like this but I have no idea how they work. Some Webdav URLs maybe?

Answer 1

Enabling external editing and using Zope External Editor Client (PYPI) should to do just that (for Archetype -based content types), but it must be installed on all client machines and may have issues. The development version should also support Dexterity-based content types.