Share Documents with external stakeholders

The Round-trip for Microsoft Word ("Word Round-trip) feature enables you to export any LiveDoc Document to Microsoft Word format and share it with people who do not have access to your Polarion portal. It can also enable a Document author to work on the Document off-line. The exported document, along with all changes to the content, can then be imported back to Polarion, where the changes are incorporated into the Document in Polarion, and the Document history is updated.

When exporting the Document, you can control the level of change that people can make to the exported document.

  • Export for Review: Content cannot be changed. Comments can be added to Work Items or text. On reimport, the comments are incorporated into the Document in the Polarion portal.

    After reimport to Polarion, comments associated with text that is not part of a Work Item appear as usual in the Document. Comments associated with content marked as Work Items appear as comments in the Document only. That is, they do not appear in other views of Work Items — in the Comments section of the Work Item in the Table view of the integrated Tracker, for example.

  • Export for Prioritization: Change is restricted to simple, single-value Work Item data fields such as Severity. Allowed fields are specified by the person exporting the Document. The user of the exported round-trip document can also insert comments to Work Item descriptions and to text that is not part of a Work Item. When the round-trip document is reimported to Polarion after changes, the Document's Work Items are updated with any changes made in the exported document, and the Work Items' history is updated.

  • Export for Collaboration: Enables the user of the exported document to change the text in the document as well as the description and/or severity level of Work Items, and multiline text and rich text fields. The document user can also insert comments to Work Item descriptions and to text that is not part of a Work Item, or remove existing comments. This export option can also be used by authors who want to work on a Document offline. In the exported round-trip document, Work Items can only be modified, not created, copied, or deleted. When a changed round-trip document is re-imported into Polarion, the original LiveDoc Document is updated with all changes to text content, comments, and Work Items, and the relevant histories are updated.

Tip:

You can prevent pages breaks from occurring within Work Items by enabling the No Page Break option in the Work Item Presentation dialog box, accessible in the Document Editor when you click the Work Item type icon in the toolbar. When selected for any Work Item type, Polarion attempts, as much as possible, not to have page breaks occur in Work Items in the exported Microsoft Word document.

Warning:

  • If the Document contained comments when it was exported, and the user of the exported round-trip document changes the text of existing comments, these changes are not imported back to Polarion. Round-trip document users should add new comments.

  • If the default paragraph style of a Microsoft Word document is customized, it will not affect its appearance when imported into Polarion, but will be applied when exported back into Word.

  • HTML and CSS styles inserted into a Wiki content block may not export correctly. To ensure that styles are exported as expected, only use the styles that are created by Polarion's Document Editor.

  • Polarion does not clean up HTML within a Wiki content block. If a block contains invalid HTML, even though it may look fine in a browser, it may look different when exported to PDF or Word formats.

    Recommendation: Use something like HTML TIDY to clean up Wiki content block HTML before exporting.

  • Cross-references created in Polarion will survive a Word Round-trip, but instead of scrolling in the Word document, they will open the referenced object in Polarion. Cross-references created in Word will not be recognized when imported into Polarion

See Macros and Wiki mark-up support in Word Round-trip for more information.

Note:

Organizations can optionally implement restrictions via the plugin API to influence the template used for export to Microsoft Word and Excel, with restrictions on individual exports by individual users, to include a watermark in the exported documents and/or to conform to other required policies. If such a plugin is in use, the Round-trip: Export Document dialog box shows a message: The selected template may be substituted with one that complies with company policy.

Tip:

Embedded image or attachment previews are preserved during the Word Round-trip process.