How to get back the old "Edit in Office" Feature - Office Connector

[Frederik Reiter]

Hi everyone,

i just wanted to share our experience with the "Edit in Office" feature.

We use a Citrix Environment to provide Access to external partners or for employees doing homeoffice. Regarding the recent vulnerabilities in confluence we were forced to upgrade to 6.15.2, wich brings the new "Edit in Office" feature with Atlassian Companion.

The Atlassian Companion app is not compatible with multi-sessionn Environments like Citrix, so we had to improvise:

We replaced the "Office-Connector-9.0.0.jar" with the "Office-Connector-6.0.0.jar" from Confluence 6.10. This brings back the old funktionality but breaks the file-preview.
So we had to replace the confluence-previews-8.1.2.jar with the confluence-previews-6.1.2.jar in the atlassian-bundled-plugins.

This actually works pretty well for us with Confluence 6.15.2. The filenames can vary in other versions of Confluence.

(The Plugins Cache has to be deleted after modification!)

Here some steps to repoduce on Linux:

cd /home/%username%
wget https://www.atlassian.com/software/confluence/downloads/binary/atlassian-confluence-6.10.2.tar.gz
tar xfvz atlassian-confluence-6.10.2.tar.gz
chown -R %username%:%groupname% atlassian-confluence-6.10.2
cp ./atlassian-confluence-6.10.2/confluence/WEB-INF/atlassian-bundled-plugins/OfficeConnector-6.0.0.jar .

cd %confluence-installation%/confluence/WEB-INF/atlassian-bundled-plugins
mv OfficeConnector-9.0.0.jar /home/%username%/
cp /home/%username%/OfficeConnector-6.0.0.jar .
chown confluence:confluence OfficeConnector-6.0.0.jar
chmod o-rwx OfficeConnector-6.0.0.jar

cd %confluence-installation%/confluence/WEB-INF/atlassian-bundled-plugins
mv confluence-previews-8.1.2.jar /home/%username%/
cp /home/%username%/confluence-previews-6.1.2.jar .
chown confluence:confluence confluence-previews-6.1.2.jar
chmod o-rwx confluence-previews-6.1.2.jar

cd %confluence-home%
rm -rf ./bundled-plugins/*
rm -rf ./plugins-cache/*
rm -rf ./plugins-osgi-cache/*
rm -rf ./plugins-temp/*
rm -rf ./bundled-plugins_language/*

[Frederik]

We are also using Citrix, this solved our problem.

Hope Atlassian will fix the companion app soon!

[Andrew S]

Looks like you have 

rm -rf ./plugins-osgi-cache/*

listed twice, I'm guessing one of them should be 

rm -rf ./plugins-temp/*

[Frederik Reiter]

Thanks! i corrected this line :)

[Frederik]

Well it seems that our protest was heard from Atlassian. They implemented a dark feature to bring back the legacy "Edit in Office" over WebDAV:

https://community.atlassian.com/t5/Confluence-articles/Changes-to-the-Companion-App-in-Confluence-6-15-5-and-6-13-6/ba-p/1108896

https://confluence.atlassian.com/doc/administering-the-atlassian-companion-app-958456281.html#AdministeringtheAtlassianCompanionApp-EnablethelegacyEditinOfficefeature

[Predrag Stojanovic]

Thanks for the short guide.

We needed to adopt it a bit with different versions of these two files as we lost "Edit with" button in preview.

Combination that works for us with Confluence 6.15.9 is :

OfficeConnector-6.0.0.jar (renamed to OfficeConnector-9.0.3.jar )
confluence-previews-7.0.19.jar (file has been taken from enterprise version 6.13.10)

What bugs me here is that Atlassian failed to implement this year and a half after initial release. 

We should have an option to choose between Old edit in office (via WebDav) and new edit in office (via Atlassian Companion app), not like they've implement it using darkfeature which totally disables the other option.

Regards,
Predrag