Ryan - thanks for the suggestion. The Word Dav plugin has some impressive functionality for enabling the use of MS Word in lieu of Confluence's Wiki Markup or Rich Text editing. Unfortunately, it does not do what we need because it doesn't retain the Microsoft Track Changes functionality. It appears to, but when you open it again all the change history is lost. The Confluence/Wiki change display function does not come close to Micosoft Change Tracking functionality, which is pretty close to exactly the way you would want it done.

Our user community heavily depends on Microsoft Track Changes. The lack of a seamless share-point-like reserved check-out/check-in feature is causing many users to turn away from Confluence. It is a real problem and top on our list of Confluence fixes. In fact, this is has become such an impediment to success that we are looking at developing our own plug-in which we would hope to share with the wider community. We would welcome partnering with anyone else to achieve this quickly.

I've created a plugin that seems to do what you want. Check it out:

http://confluence.atlassian.com/display/CONFEXT/Word.DAV+plugin

I concur with Ray's comments - Confluence is very close to being able to provide Sharepoint-like functionality - it just needs a check-out/check-in interface, and a hook with MS Office desktop software. Like Ray, we would like that to be accessible from the regular Confluence Pages - not a separate path.

Note that these two functions (check-out/check-in, hook to MS Office desktop software could be treated as separate functions from an implementation perspective - they are each useful in their own right. Put them together and you have a powerful collaboration capability.

I'm not sure why this issue was "incorporated into" the Sharepoint Integration issue (conf-7349). As I read conf-7349, it is for people that have installed Sharepoint and want the functionality integrated. That's a good feature as well, but we are hoping to obviate the need for Sharepoint in the first place.

Thanks,
Andy Schoenbach

Actually you guys are rather close and UI improvements would make it compare rather nicely to sharepoint. In fact, all the editing so doing in share point is doing an open via the WebDAV path. Heck - just having a link to the WebDAV path from the attachments page would make a big difference. From Office Apps now I can open and edit and save documents via Conflunce WebDAV URLs - the major pain right now is that you have to remember that weird WebDAV plugin path as it is different than the location of the attachment in a confluence URL.

I've seen the WebDav functionality and indeed it is quite need for editing documents. However, this functionality is very specific to Word/Microsoft. Without actually haven't done any research on it, I doubt it's trivial to hook into Word like SharePoint does. After all they have the advantage of working for the same company.

The WebDav editing option seems more likely do be attacked in the near future and we already have an existing feature request for it. Please have a look and vote under:

http://jira.atlassian.com/browse/CONF-3519

Cheers,
Jens