Your feedback wanted: Improving Deployment for Office Document Solutions

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# Your feedback wanted: Improving Deployment for Office Document Solutions, Microsoft Office developer blog said on July 17, 2008 12:08 AM:

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# Mac said on July 17, 2008 4:20 AM:

Created an excel document project to store contacts.

Our company is trying to migrate away from several contact management systems full of junk and has tasked all the staff with putting their up to date contact info into spreadsheets which will then be imported to our ERP system.

Creating the excel document and form was easy, that part I liked. When it came to actually releasing it so that users could download and use it, I was overwhelmed by the difficulty and caveats of doing so, mainly security related but throw in an external data connection/query and you might as well give up, it was so time consuming and frustrating in fact that I ended up having to ditch it and redesign the document using old school macros which worked first time having been signed, without the incredible hassel of vsto deployment.

Deployment is via Sharepoint (MOSS 2007)

Updates can be as often as weekly.

As far as security goes, if you are a member of the domain, and the document is signed by a developer with a valid certificate issued by the sys admin, it should run without installs, warning dialogs and desktop configuration changes.

As for point 5, always willing to try new approaches but ultimately it has to work reliably and be efficient. The VSTO I tried was just that, until it came to deployment.

# pankaj jain said on August 18, 2008 9:20 PM:

i am trying to deploy vsto solution in moss 2007 and facing problems. when i try to deploy through network folder and copy the dotx file in document library of share point. my document loaded and display an error that your customization library could not be loaded.Please advise me what to do so that i could come out of this problem. Your help will be highly appriciated.

# VSTO Team said on August 19, 2008 12:16 AM:

hi pankaj,

you must set the Installation path through the Publish Wizard or Publish Page of the Project Designer. alternately, you can use Word to set the path to the customization assembly.

step-by-step instructions are at http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/bb608595.aspx

m.

# Sasha Stankovic said on October 10, 2008 6:04 AM:

For the CRM project, I have developed a VSTO Word template an it works fine when I start the template directly (by double clicking on it). In order to work, I needed to setup some privileges to attached assembly (customization if you prefer), but that is not related to my problem (maybe I'm wrong). It seems that I cannot start the very same template from c# win form from another (not VSTO) project (either by starting the new word process or by using interop to create new word doc out from VSTO template). Ok, the Word App starts, a new word doc (Document1.doc) is created based on template, but nothing happens (customization did nothing). No messages from Word App like the customization privileges problem etc...So my basic question/problem is: How can I start a VSTO word/template solution from win form (and to actually work? :)  

(VSTO 2005 for 2003 Office, VS 2005, .Net 2.0 c#)

Thanks in advance.

# Shirley said on November 5, 2008 6:16 AM:

As a seasoned VBA developer moving to VSTO 2008 is a steep learning curve and it would be really helpful if you could make deploying solutions to all users and not just current user, a lot easier.

# VSTO Team said on November 5, 2008 2:09 PM:

Hi Shirley -

We're making efforts to change some of the settings that are available in Office 14 that will enable the Visual Studio team to create better deployment for All_Users.  For now, the workaround is available for current versions of Office, and we agree it isn't easy.  Thanks for your feedback.  Every time we get another message from customers about this issue, it strengthens our request to the O14 team.  We're able to use your message when we meet with the engineering teams to request changes.  

Sincerely,

Christin Boyd

Program Manager

Visual Studio Team

# Joe said on November 10, 2008 3:35 PM:

"if you install VSTO 2005 SE on top of a clean VS 2005 Professional, you won't have the document-level templates.  If you want to have them you need to have VS 2005 Team Suite/Team Edition or you need to install the previous version of VSTO: VSTO 2005. So VS 2005 Professional + VSTO 2005 + VSTO 2005 SE will give you the document-level templates!" according to http://weblogs.asp.net/jan/archive/2006/12/07/where-are-the-document-level-templates-in-vsto-2005-se.aspx

So my question is where can I get VSTO 2005, because I need the document level templates. PS. Deploying looks like it is very difficult.  I could not do it with the app add-on so that I why I would like to try document level.

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