Following is our setup & requirement:
- There's a public web application accessible via SSL + Basic Authentication. Most of these applications are in ASP.Net; couple of legacy ones are in classic ASP. Server is Win 2003 / IIS 6.0
- This application needs to support online editing of (mostly) MS Office documents (2007 & 2010). The documents themselves are stored in the database, along with the content of the application.
- The users should be able to open the document via HTML links; the corresponding external Office application (say MS Word) should open the document in edit mode (with exclusive lock) and when the user presses Save button, the document should be posted back to the application.
- Preferably no external plugins/ActiveX controls need to be deployed on the client side.
Is a custom WebDAV implementation the best possible approach? Note that we might not need all the features of WebDAV for supporting above requirements. Are you aware of any alternatives?
If custom WebDAV implementation is the way to go, can you please recommend some good resources (commercial/open source IIS plugins, samples in .Net, docs, etc), apart from http://www.webdav.org/ ? BTW, I do not prefer installing a bulky CMS like Sharepoint to support such a small requirement!
I found a thread on SO about custom WebDav implementation: What are your experiences implementing/using WebDAV? It sounds so discouraging :( (Avialable only on IIS root, requires Windows authentication, etc)
Thanks in advance!