Setting up Document Conversion

Some documents — including PDFs and some of the Office documents — are supported in a preview view in Jive. To convert content from its native format into a form that can be previewed without altering the original document, you need the Document Conversion module. This module you deploy on a server that is separate from your core Jive production instances.

Jive gives users the ability to upload Office and Adobe PDF documents to the community for easy content sharing and collaboration. The Document Conversion service converts uploaded documents to a standard PDF format and then converts them again to Adobe Flash (.swf files) so that they can then be viewed in a web browser without needing to open the document's native software application.

We support converting the following file types:

  • doc
  • ppt
  • docx
  • pptx
  • xls
  • xlsx
  • pdf
Note: For more information about managing conversion attempts and reconverting documents if necessary, see Managing Document Conversion.

Here is an overview of the steps you perform to set up Document Conversion:

  1. Set up a production instance of the Jive application. You should devote one node in your installation to document conversion. For more information, see Installing Jive package and starting up.
  2. Install the Jive platform RPM on your conversion node machine, as described in Setting up conversion machine. Then disable the services not related to document conversion. Download and install the correct RPM for the PDF2SWF utility on the conversion node machine. You can find the RPMs at https://static.jiveon.com/docconverter.
    Note: If you receive the following error when installing either the jive_sbs rpm or jive_pdf2swf, use the --replacefiles flag on the document conversion node. 
    file /usr/local/jive/bin/pdf2swf from install of rpm_name conflicts with file from package other_rpm_name the flag
  3. Enable the Document Conversion service by using the following commands: 
    jive enable docconverter
jive start
  4. On the application node, configure the application to communicate with the conversion machines, as described in Configuring Document Conversion node connection.
  5. If you want to set up secure communication to the conversion machine, see Setting up SSL for Document Conversion.