Trust Centre and Office Development
As developers writing code for Office, we all need to be aware of security. Let's face it, we've had a mixed experience so far. Virus writers took advantage of the simplicity and ubiquity of VBA in Office. As a result we added a security model which can block VBA from executing, prevent loading ActiveX controls, etc. But in the past, the experience could have been improved for the end user. Many simply turned off these security features and ran any code in any file. Or IT departments locked down their environments so that users could not execute any code. There is a happy medium where most users should be able to execute code they can trust.
Dave has a short guest series on his blog discussing the new trust experience in Office 2007 - The Trust Center.
SamRad lays the backdrop in the first post - Principles, and discusses why we made the decisions we did. Then he continues this with post 2 - "Eliminating Unnecessary Trust Decisions" to compare and contrast the experience with our previous versions. Sam's third post, "Making Sense of Security Settings" describes what happens when you set all the switches and turn all the dials on the Trust Center. Sam finishes with a post on "Trusted Locations" to describe how the user can set areas on their drive to be trusted for code execution.
