Our team is looking for feedback on how we can improve the deployment experience for VSTO document solutions.  We are interested in hearing how you deploy your Excel spreadsheet/template and Word document/template solutions today & what sorts of improvements you’d like to see us make in the next version.  Please use the Comment feature of this blog to tell us about your requirements. 

Please specify if you are using VS 2005, VS 2008, Office 2007, or VBA.

1. Describe your document based solution.  What does it do?  Who is the target customer?  Are you targeting Office 2003 or Office 2007?
2. How do you deploy your VBA and VSTO solutions today? Do you distribute via web download, DVD, e-mail or SharePoint? 
3. How frequently do you update the document and the underlying code?
4. What are your security requirements? 
5. What drives your decision to choose a particular technology? 

How would you stack rank the following features?

• Security - Certificates
• Security - Office Macro Settings
• Security - Trusted Locations
• Seamless first run experience
• Publish regular updates
• Email-based deployment
• Web-based deployment
• Deploy to SharePoint
• Deploy to File Share
• Install from CD
• Install from one location – update from another
• Download updates in the background

We may not reply directly to every single comment, but we will read them carefully and use them to design future solutions for Office Developers.  Thank you for your time and valuable feedback.

Sincerely,

Rachel Schaw