 Hi, everyone. So, yeah, in Moodle 3.3 we released a new document converter, which uses Google Drive. It's the first thing that I will do is explain what a document converter is because it's quite specific and I'll explain the actual problem that we're solving by adding this new version of it. But basically there's some processes in Moodle where we need to take a Word file and convert it to a PDF. Now the main use case that we need to do this conversion for is the assignment annotate PDF feature that people will be familiar with that lets you draw over the top of students assignment submission and add comments and give them feedback and then they get a downloadable version of that submission and they can get it as PDF or they can view it online. This annotate PDF part of the assignment module originally came from a plug-in in the plug-ins database a few years ago now, which used to look like this and then the functionality in there was so good that we went through and we had to make a lot of updates and improve the UI, but we took that pretty much the idea of that plug-in and added it directly into Core so it's now built in for every site. That plug-in is really cool and it was actually written by Davo Smith who used it in his own teaching and so by using it and also being a developer he spent a lot of time refining it and making it a really useful tool for teachers. So the way that that plug-in actually works under the hood is it takes a PDF file and then it uses a program on the Moodle server called GhostScript which is what that funny sheet with the horns is. That's their actual logo I didn't make that up. And it uses GhostScript to take that PDF and split it into a series of image files. And when you view the files in Moodle what you're actually looking at is the image file on the background and then you're creating annotations on top of that image file so the annotations is whatever you draw and all the comments that you add and then when you're finished you save it and it uses GhostScript on the server again which is this little program to make it into the PDF that the students can download. Now GhostScript itself likes to eat PDF files but it doesn't like to eat Word files just because that's the way it is. And also other kinds of office documents like PowerPoints and spreadsheets and HTML files and things like that. It only knows how to read this one kind of file. So we need something to make that easier. A student you can tell them so that they have to upload all their assignment submissions as PDF. And if they do that then we don't have to do any conversions on the server. We can just use GhostScript and everything will work. But a student might understand complicated maths but they might not understand file types so much if it depends how comfortable they are with computers and lots of things. So it's much better if we can just take whatever file they give us and convert it to PDF for them. So in order to do that we need another thing on the server. So in a couple of versions ago we wrote something so that we could do this on the server. We didn't want to write our own because it's actually a very difficult task to try and understand all the different possible office formats and convert them into a PDF in a quality way that preserves all of the character sets and images and formatting. There wasn't any good choices for a library that we could just use to put into Moodle. And another option would have been using a cloud service. There are some cloud services that exist but whenever we add a new feature in Moodle we try and do it in a way that everybody can use it without having restrictions. So cloud services are good for some things but in some environments people aren't allowed to use them because maybe they're on an intranet or maybe they're in China or maybe they don't have any money to pay for a cloud service on top of their Moodle site. So we try and prefer open source solutions and we try and get something that maybe requires some configuration but people should be able to install it without restrictions. So there was two good choices for open source document conversions which we looked at. The first one was PANDOC and the second one was Unicom which is part of Open Office or Libre Office. PANDOC was looking really promising until we started testing it with more complicated documents and basically the results that you get out of it didn't look anything like the files that you sent into it. So that's a big problem when you're trying to mark students assignment submissions. You don't want them to be marked down for poor formatting and things like that when it's actually a problem with the system. Unicom gave us very good results but the problem is it's very hard to install. So some people here, like I'm sure the catalyst guys have looked at it but it requires some very technical knowledge for the system administrator who's trying to set this up because it's not designed to be run on a web server. It's actually designed to be run on somebody's desktop machine just doing one file at a time. So because of that it's quite complicated to get it installed and working well and we got a lot of complaints basically. People tried to set this up and they couldn't do it properly. So what we tried to do in Moodle 3.3, the first thing is that we just tried to make this into an API. So people didn't like the Unicom part of this process so we tried to make it plug in based so that people could come up with their own solutions and add them in themselves. So maybe they could integrate with the cloud service or add another way to do it. But the other thing that was happening at the same time is that we were working on our office integrations and we wrote a lot of new APIs for dealing with Google and Office 365 and it just so happened that Google has a very simple way where you can upload a file to Google and download it as a PDF. And now we had a nice API to talk to Google. All we had to do was just plug those things together and we got a very simple document converter which uses Google Drive. So all you have to do if you're already using the new Google Drive integration, you'll have already set up all of the authentication and the system accounts that you need. So all you would need to do in that case is just click on this little I and enable the document converter and there's no other installation that you have to do. If you aren't using the Google integration, maybe you're using the Office 365 or you're not using any of those things, you can set up this document converter and use it without any of the other pieces of the Google integration. So people don't even have to know that you're using this behind the scenes. It will just every time it needs to convert a document, it will upload it to a specific Google account, download the PDF and then delete the original file. It is important to know that it actually does send the files to Google and then brings them back just in terms of privacy and any privacy policies or anything that you might have at your institution. But it does work really well and it gives you some good functionality. So as I mentioned, that's how it works. Every time it needs to do a conversion, it uploads it into Google and then downloads the PDF and it reuses all of the same configuration for the other parts of the Google integration. Another benefit is that the processing is actually done on Google. So sometimes doing that document conversion can be a CPU intensive job. And if you're doing it in your web server, that might slow down the processing of web requests and give students make your site seem slow for a minute or so. But in this case, it's not actually doing that. It's Google that's going to slow down not you and they can handle it. They've got lots of big data centers. Some things to note about it is that it will use bandwidth to upload and download the files to Google. So if you're being charged for that bandwidth, you might want to look at the volume of files and keep an eye on it. As I mentioned, you should put it in a privacy policy that files shared with Google and the reason why they shared with Google. And the other thing is just that different Google accounts have limits on the number of API calls you can make to them. It's something that you can configure and it just depends on your type of account that you have with Google. And you can see in the Google console how many API calls you're making and whether you're going to hit a limit or not. So the other thing to mention is that we did make this a plug in API so people can write plug ins to do this conversion now. And it's got a category in the Moodle Plugins DB, which is currently empty. So if anyone feels like writing another kind of plug in, they could be the first. And they can have the best stats and get all good ratings and all sorts. There's an opportunity for people. And that's the end. Thank you, everyone. Thank you, Damien. Questions? Does anyone have questions for Damien? Here we go. Hey, Damien. You said with the documents being sent to Google Drive and converted and sent back. So it's fair to presume that's offshore? Yeah, I think it could be offshore. I guess there's some settings in the Google administration console that give you some control over that. But I'm not exactly sure I haven't played with that myself. What is Google? Do you know what Google might do with the file when it's converted and sent back? Is anything left with Google? No, we delete the file as soon as it's been converted. Thank you. We had lots of problems with the biographies being changed around and the formatting being taken out for the Unicode thing. Is Google Drive any better or Google conversion? I don't know specifically about biographies, but the conversions that I've seen have supported everything that has been in the Word documents that I've tested it with. Any other questions? Okay. Thank you, Damien.