Tag: install

Web Add-in Side Loader Tool

David E. Craig1 Comment

Whether you have been following the guidance for Centralized Deployment of Web Add-ins or you do not have Office 365 and you want to create a SharePoint catalog for deployment, but realize it has limitations:

App catalogs on SharePoint do not support add-in features that are implemented in the VersionOverrides node of the add-in manifest, such as add-in commands.

You essentially try all the options on this page and find that side loading is the only method that will work. So you give it a shot, it works and now you are wondering how to deploy that to a larger group of users.

That is where this new tool that a fellow co-worker (Marty Andren) and I created will come in handy: The Web Add-in Side Loader Tool. Here is the link to the GitHub where it and it’s documentation are located:

https://github.com/davecra/WebAddinSideloader

Please let me know if you have any questions or issues with this tool.

Script to Migrate Normal.dot

David E. CraigLeave a comment

When you deploy Office 2010 over an existing install of Office 2003, one thing that will happen is that user settings in Microsoft Word (auto-text, styles, macros,etc.) will not translate forward. This is because as part of the migration process, the Normal.dot for Office 2003 is renamed to Normal11.dot. The following article details this:

The article outlines a set of steps to manually replace the original Normal.dot. However, it does not provide a means to perform this step during setup/deployment or as a script to be deployed as part of a post-install or login.

The following is a JavaScript sample that performs the steps outlined in the KB article above:

shell = new ActiveXObject('WScript.Shell'); 
userPath = shell.ExpandEnvironmentStrings('%UserProfile%'); 
var path = userPath + "\\AppData\\Roaming\\Microsoft\\Templates\\";
var fs = new ActiveXObject("Scripting.FileSystemObject");
var newNormal = fs.GetFile(path + "normal.dotm");
newNormal.Move(path + "new_normal.dotm");
var oldNormal = fs.GetFile(path + "normal11.dot");
oldNormal.Move(path + "normal.dot");