Professional SharePoint® 2007 Web Content Management Development: Building Publishing Sites with Office SharePoint Server 2007

18.7. Summary

This chapter introduced an alternate way to create content within a Publishing site, or any MOSS site, using document converters. The document converter framework enables users to create new pages within a Publishing site by authoring the documents in Word 2007, InfoPath 2007, or a raw XML file. While only four document converters are included OOTB that are intended to be used in the context of Publishing sites, the document converter infrastructure is part of the MOSS Enterprise Content Management strategy and can therefore be used to take any type of document and convert it to another type.

Thankfully, the document converter framework is not sealed and can be leveraged by developers in creating custom document converters. Not only can custom document converters be created to satisfy any business requirements, but developers can also add custom settings pages and controls that site administrators and users alike can consume in order to personalize each execution of the custom document converter.