Overview

Jive employs an internal document converter that serves the purpose of providing previews of Office documents.

This document converter, that in Cloud instances is a shared service, performs a two-step process: the document is converted to PDF and then to HTML.

Diagnosis

When accessing the document, the following error is displayed for a short time:

Then, after a while, the error message changes to:

Also trying to access the PDF version of the document does not work.

The PDF version is accessible by adding .pdf at the end of the URL, for example:
https://instance.jiveon.com/docs/DOC-1234 becomes https://instance.jiveon.com/docs/DOC-1234.pdf

Usually, a blank PDF is generated instead of the correct preview.

In the instance logs (Kibana for cloud, or the sbs.log file for Hosted/On-Prem), searching for the com.jivesoftware.conversion.executor.GenericConversionExecutor logger, an error similar to the following is displayed:

 

Solution

Jive has a size limit of 50MB in the conversion process.

This means that files bigger than 50MB will fail the conversion.

But since the conversion is a composite process DOC > PDF > HTML, also files close to 50MB that, for various reasons, generate PDFs bigger than 50MB will fail the conversion.

For example, a heavy Powerpoint Presentation (.pptx) of 43 MB in size may fail the conversion even if originally below the 50MB limit.

The document will still be available for download.

The proposed workaround is to reduce the size of the document, removing unneeded content. Usually, such a big size is due to videos or high-resolution images embedded in the document itself.