Web Add-in Side Loader Tool

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

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");