(photo by FSEE-INFO of flickr)

Scribd has a new feature they call iPaper. This basically involves converting various document formats, including word and powerpoint into embeddable Flash content with read-only access.

Many of our clients would like to display content originally created in MS Word on their Web sites. In most cases, copy/paste from Word into a WYSIWYG HTML editor like Xinha or TinyMCE is problematic at best. This is especially true if the original document uses tables or other advanced features besides simple paragraphs and fonts.  We have worked hard at trying to add documentation on how to do this, but Scribd may offer an easier alternative in some cases.

The documents must be uploaded to Scribd and then they are converted to flash, similar to youtube.  Unlike youtube it allows users to keep documents private. This means they have a secret URL and are not searchable by other users on the site. For many uses this is sufficient security. The document can be embedded into the client Web site, and viewed in that context.

For some clients, such as hospitals, uploading documents to an outside server is not acceptable, and in those cases traditional OpenACS File Storage or copy/paste along with HTML cleanup is the answer.