MultiView / PD-QVP Plugin:
The plugin enables use of the Outside In viewer technology from Oracle (previously from Stellent).
The Multiview plugin is a "legacy" solution and should only be used if you can't use an alternative, such as the viewers which come with Microsoft Office. See the alternative viewer recommendations below for alternatives.
The plugin used to be called PD-QVP and was renamed to MultiView in later versions.
The plugin comes with Opus but is disabled by default.
Required 3rd party DLLs:
The MultiView plugin will not function without a copy of the Outside In viewer DLLs. These DLLs came with several packages including very old versions of Quick View Plus, older versions of Powerdesk and (at least some old versions of) Yahoo Desktop Search. The DLLs do not come with Opus and it is your responsibility to obtain properly licensed copies of them.
You can currently find them under Outside In Downloads on Oracle's site, under Viewer Technology, where you want either the Windows (x86-32) or Windows (x86-64) downloads, depending on if you use 32-bit or 64-bit Windows/Opus.
If you download the DLLs from Oracle (or anyone else), please ensure the licence terms are valid for your usage; we are not lawyers and have no control over what the licence terms require today or if they are changed in the future. Note, in particular, this excerpt from Oracle's licence terms (at time of updating this post, March 2019), which are quite limiting:
Oracle grants You a nonexclusive, nontransferable, limited license to internally use the Programs, subject to the restrictions stated in this Agreement, only for the purpose of developing, testing, prototyping, and demonstrating Your application and only as long as Your application has not been used for any data processing, business, commercial, or production purposes, and not for any other purpose.
The plugin's configuration window lets you specify where the DLLs are located. It should be the folder containing sccvw.dll and various other DLLs.
If you are using a 64-bit version of Directory Opus then the MultiView plugin requires 64-bit versions of the Outside In DLLs. (Similarly, the 32-bit plugin requires the 32-bit DLLs.) You will also need Opus 12.12.3 or above for the 64-bit DLLs to work.
Alternative Viewer Recommendations:
We recommend you try one of these more modern approaches before investigating the MultiView plugin:
-
The ActiveX + Preview + Office + Web plugin can be used to view many formats that people used MultiView for in the past (e.g. Office documents), provided a suitable program or viewer is installed on your machine (e.g. MS Office).
-
For a while, newer versions of QuickView Plus gave you access to exactly the same viewers that MultiView used, but in a much better way. (You just install it and it automatically works, on both 32-bit and 64-bit systems, without any further configuration or hunting down DLLs.) This is because they included a preview handler which Opus was able to use automatically. However, some users have told us that newer versions of QuickView Plus have dropped this feature, and the makers of it will no longer sell you the older versions, so please be weary of that. As it is not our product, we cannot make any definitive statements on what it does or doesn't do. See the forum's QuickView Plus thread for more information.