This question comes up a lot from our customers but are there any plans to include an Office document viewer in the Laserfiche Client or Quick Fields?
Thank you for your feature request. An item to include an embedded electronic document (including Office documents) viewer already exists on the Web Access backlog, though it is not within the scope of the next release.
In most cases the reason this would be desirable would be so they display in the preview pane and when browsing through a batch of documents they can view everything in the same window without having to opening separate instances of Word, Excel etc. We have one customer who generates images for every email just so they can view a preview as the text preview doesn't really look like an email this way.
For Quick Fields then the request has only been made once and that was so they can refer to the original electronic document when processing it.
I understand the technical difficulties and that is out of Laserfiche's hands in many ways but users tend to expect it to display all the common file types within Laserfiche itself. I've seen other systems that can display MS Office documents (or a simplified preview of) without having to open a separate window.
Does Laserfiche 10 do this? It's a standard feature in Windows Folders and I think there is a great argument for its value: convenience = time saved = $$ saved
Hi Guys,
A lot of the clients I am working with would like to have this option? is this possible? or do they require to generate pages for each document that comes in?
Especially when they are saving emails and instead of clicking each email to find out which one they need to open, they can click on it and see a preview on the screen?
Thank you
Ziad
It has come up in the past, but I don't know if Microsoft Office allows being embedded in third-party applications (i.e. Laserfiche) in the manner that Adobe Reader does.
In any case, it would be good to know your customers' exact use case beyond "it would be nice to have as a matter of convenience."
This has to be the single most requested feature we hear echoed from our customers, are there any updates to this?
Hi Chris and Ziad,
The 10.1 Web Client includes the ability to integrate with an installed instance of Office Web Apps Server. If that's set up, Office documents will be viewable in their native format directly through the preview pane and document viewer. Because it relies on web technology, it's only available in the Web Client. https://www.laserfiche.com/support/webhelp/Laserfiche/10/en-us/administration/#../Subsystems/WAConfiguration/Content/general-services.htm has some more information on it.
Thanks for the update Justin, however literally none of our customers use the web client. Everyone uses the full client. Do we know if/when this might be introduced to the full client? Cheers!
Thank you, Justin.
Is this the solution Laserfiche mentioned at the conference this year or will there be an update in 10.2.1 (or later) that includes a feature such as this out of the box?
Thanks,
Robyn
Hi Chris,
There aren't currently plans to implement this in the desktop Client due to the nature of the integration. I guess my question for you would be why your customers don't use the web client, especially with the updates made to it for version 10 and the significant ease of administration. I'm curious if there are specific elements here.
Robyn to your question - this was introduced in Web Client 10.1. It requires that Office Web Apps be installed in the environment to integrate with.
That's a very good question Justin, none of our customers use web access for various reasons. Some of which are:-
Maybe it's just a European thing, but I don't foresee anything changing in the near future in a move towards the web client.
Edit:- Thinking about this further, for users who have been using the full client, it would almost be a step backwards for them to switch to WA. New clients perhaps not so much, but then I'm sure given the chioce they would go down the full client route.
What might be an idea in the future would be to offer a web only version of the product at a reduced cost?