Brief:
This word plugin was developed to help various article authors to publish their articles directly to the website from any part of the world. Move it through different stages of article review. Sending notifications to users involved in review process after every state change. And making it live after all the review process was complete.
Need :
Since the article authors were situated in different parts of the world, it used to be difficult and time consuming to gather all articles than have a review process and publish it to web. It required a system where the authors can easily write and send the articles across for review and also again edit the articles after publish and again publish it no time to web.
How It Works:
Word Plugin is a windows application and using interop assemblies it was able to work with word. First off a ribbon was created for word that had various options using which the user could login into the system, open the create article option, get various elements present on the server to insert into the article and so on.
This plugin connects to a server. The server database stores the articles created, user information, review stage information etc. Articles stored in the database are then published to the website.
Every author member of this particular group needs to install this plugin. This acts an add-in into word. When the user wants to write an article the author can open word and can perform various actions on the article using this plugin.
After opening word the user first needs to login using login button present the ribbon and connect to the server. Author can then start writing the article into word. The plugin also provides the functionality to add references of different articles that were created earlier. The user just has to enter the article number in search tab of plugin. The plugin will contact to server with the article number and if the article exists on server, server will return its details. The author can then preview the article and check if the article is desired and click on insert. This will enter the reference article link at the desired location in the word document. Similar functionality is available to insert images, few other categories like country, industry and so on.
After completing the article user can click on create article option and this will provide him options to select under which category the article needs to be created, what should be the publish date and who is the author. After all these details are entered the author can click on Save article button and this article along with all the text, images etc. will saved on the server. The author is also given a choice to save a local copy to it. The author than make to changes and save the changes in similar way.
The plugin also provides the functionality to have different review stages. Until and unless the article does not reach the last review stage it is never published. There are different users associated with every stage. These members are always notified when the article moves to the review stage they are assigned to and so that they can review it and move it to the next step for review. This helps the article to move to last stage of review and get published automatically once the publish date is reached.
The authors can also download the articles from the server and modify them and send them to review.
This plugin thus helps the authors and the organization to create, maintain and publish articles from any part of the world with a limited time frame.
