Web-based document viewer, including Office formats

Question

I am looking for a web way to display user files tiff, pdf, doc (x) and xls (x). This is required from a business point of view, and I do not have much weight / control in the decision. The web application will be used by both internal and external clients, but not publicly.

Pricing isn’t so important right now, active stakeholders know that this is extremely important and important. Thus, the price does not matter.

I was hoping someone else google-fu would be better than mine or know of a good solution / product that does not necessarily have good search engine rankings.

A bit more info

I believe that all we need is a way to view images. We will not follow up on any comments or annotations. It would be nice to have thumbnail management to make it easier to scroll through many pages (up around 100), but this is not required. There will be other controls on the page, so I'm looking for a minimalistic viewer. The ability to customize navigation buttons / controls will also be an added bonus. It will also be developed / deployed using ASP.NET MVC2 on the IIS7 x64 platform.

A silver / flash / solution control solution would also be acceptable.

Current results

• Preview TIF Documents on the Web (.Net C #) - For TIF Images Only
• http://www.accusoft.com/prizmviewerfeatures.htm - uses a browser plugin. This is not ideal, but an opportunity.
• http://www.atalasoft.com/products/dotimage - doesn't seem to support MSFT Office formats, doesn't mention MVC support.
• http://www.snowbound.com/viewer_inaction/viewerdemos.html - As long as it comes forward, it supports many formats (pay for the formats you need), But again, no mention of MVC.
• Google Docs API From what I can say, to use Google Transform, you need to host documents on your server. This will not work for us because of the confidential information that the documents have.

Answer 1

There is a partial solution for this, which includes converting various documents to HTML for display (or any other format supported on the Internet) in a web browser. It does not satisfy all your requirements, but it may ultimately lead to something useful.

JODConverter offers a server-side Java solution that uses the powerful OpenOffice.org converter to convert from any supported format to any other supported format.

From the website:

JODConverter, Java OpenDocument Converter converts documents between different office formats. It uses OpenOffice.org, which provides the best possible import / export filters for OpenDocument and Microsoft. Available Office Formats

I have successfully used to convert documents from MSWord to HTML for display in a browser. Any format supported by OpenOffice is supported by JODConverter. Thus, the supported formats are PDF, MS, TIFF and others.

This is java, so it is platform independent - I used it on a Windows, Mac, and Linux server.

Answer 2

There are several others that I have found:

http://www.eviewer.net : An HTML5-based viewer that has both .NET and a Java backend.

http://www.ms-technology.com/viewing-solutions : they have a Java Applet, Silverlight, Flash viewers that will also satisfy your needs.

Hope this helps.