The case of the missing add-in
Posted by admin on May 25, 2008 in forms, news, tocs
It has been our single most important problem with our line of Office productivity add-ins. And the reason why we haven’t been able to keep our development schedule on time.
The problem
Microsoft has been trying to improve the security of users of their Office software for years and has come with a number of schemes to prevent the execution and propagation of viruses (and other malware) in the form of addins for Office applications.
They have basically worked in two different directions:
- Preventing the execution of code not signed.
- Preventing the execution of code not installed on a particular place on the system (a trusted location to use their terminology).
Each version of Office from 2000 to 2007 has implement an slightly different way of handling the security issues. In particular Office 2003 (by far the most popular version of Office used by our customers) uses a security level by default that prevents any add-in to work, unless it is installed on a trusted location.
On top of that, there are a number of different issues that can prevent an add-in to be properly installed, including trying to install it when the host application (Word or PowerPoint) is running, not using an administrator account, and several more.
Whatever the problem, the result is always the same: The toolbar is not shown, and the user has no idea about what might be wrong because there isn’t any error message displayed.
It is impossible for us to know what proportion of our potential clients have had this problem in the past. According to our uninstall survey it has been the most common cause that has prevented our potential customers to try the software.
Therefore it has been a huge problem for us. We have tried several approaches to solve it, like including a topic in the help file, a page in our web site and two demos, explaining the procedure to setup the addin.
Sales for our add-ins have been dropping consistently during 2008, although the volume of visits to the MomSoft site and downloads of our add-ins have remained fairly constant during the period.
The solution?
Finally, around a month ago I had an idea. It is not very difficult to make an utility that looks at all the appropriate places on a computer system to try to determine if an add-in is correctly installed, registered, not disabled and if the security setting of the host Office application is preventing the execution of add-ins.
The result is what I have called the "installation check utility", for lack of a better name. An screenshot of the utility is shown below:
We released new versions of FormsAssistant and PowerTOC last weekend. The new versions include the setup check utility and execute it immediately after finishing the installation. Sales have returned back to the levels of 2007, so maybe I have been able to nail down the problem. Of course, a week is not enough time to know.
I keep my fingers crossed.
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