In the following you will see different scenarios of how and when you can integrate different applications and interfaces when using Domino.Doc as the back-end, storing and keeping track of the documents, as any good document management system should.

In one of the forthcoming articles, we will dig deeper into more specific examples of how to integrate with suites, such as Sun's StarOffice and Novell's Groupwise. I'll also describe how we communicate between COM, OLE, and UNO interfaces. But in this article I'll show you a couple ways that you could choose to integrate with Domino.Doc.

Standard vs. Custom interface
First of all, you'll have to choose whether you want to use the Domino.Doc ODMA interface or not. If you choose not to install the interface, there are some things that are more difficult, but almost anything can be done.

On the other hand, if you install the Domino.Doc ODMA, you will need to push that to all clients that will use the Domino.Doc integration. The installation of this is straightforward.

It seems that many users choose the Domino.Doc ODMA due to the nice look and feel and the tight integration with the operating system that it's working on. For the programmers and integrators, it also provides a natural interface to the Notes and Domino defined document types in Domino.Doc.

The profiles for a document type are shown in Figure A.

FIGURE A


Here are the profiles for a document type. Roll over picture for a larger image.

When installing the Domino.Doc ODMA, you get different standard interfaces for different products. Among the applications that support the interface, we find Office 2000, Office 97, Visio, WordPro, Freelance, and WordPerfect.

The Domino.Doc interface for these applications provides event notifications as hooks, making it appear to be a part of the application that it's presented in. For example, when you do a "Save As" in Microsoft Word you'll see that the Domino.Doc ODMA has changed the look of the dialog box in Word.