Project Background
Corcentric provides simple to use, yet sophisticated software to improve procurement, accounts payable and accounts receivable. As with many of our clients, they have significant in-house skills to develop their core products. When they decided to embed Microsoft Office inside their web application using WOPI, they realised, due to complexity and time constraints that they would need the expertise of a WOPI specialist.
In addition, they also required a Word Add-In to let them insert clauses, terms and other related information into contracts and templates (you can read about this on Corcentric's web site). This includes the development of a desktop Sync app which allowes desktop Word to sync seamlessly with the core Corcentric CLM application without the user needing to download and upload files.
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The Challenge
The challenge here was to provide a Laravel PHP implementation of WOPI that would run in a clustered, cloud environment. Whereas Microsoft provide a tiny amount of base code and assistance for .Net, Java and Python, no such assistance is available for PHP.
For the Add-In, we needed to work closely with the SaaS development team at Corcentric to use and develop their APIs further.
The Solution
McKenna Consultants provided a complete service for implementing the WOPI and Add-In solution including everything from programming to guiding Corcentric through the Microsoft approval process. The overall solution is a stateless, microservice which easily scales across the complete Corcentric customer base. We combined our skills in PHP with our expertise in WOPI and produced a Docker-based Laravel implementation of the WOPI protocol. In particular, the Proof Key implementation was challenging and required a combination of different security technologies as well as a knowledge of CPU architecture to get working in PHP. Microsoft approved this WOPI implementation on the first submission.
Click here to learn more about Corcentric’s CLM software https://www.corcentric.com/source-to-pay/software/contract-lifecycle-management/
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