Enterprise deployment
Involving your IT-admin
Probably the most likely installation stumbling block for most users is that your firm/company has blocked you from installing add-ins in Microsoft Word. In such case, you will notice that the "Get Add-ins" button is greyed out.
If this is the case, then you will need to either switch to the browser-version of ClauseBase (see above — the downside is that you will have copy/paste between Word/Outlook), or alternatively involve your organisation's IT-expert ("administrator"), who has the required superpowers to grant you installation rights for the add-in.
Be friendly to this person, as he/she has a very good reason to block add-ins: the previous generation of add-ins had a very bad reputation of causing severe slowdowns and difficult-to-trace crashes. (We've all seen fast computers that take over a minute to load MS Word!)
If required, you can explain that the new generation of add-ins does not suffer from this problem. Unlike the old generation of add-ins (which install their tentacles into the brains, guts and nerves of Word), next-gen add-ins such as ClauseBuddy are forced by Microsoft to remain at the surface. They consist of so-called "JavaScript code" (instead of 32/64 bit executable files), and are executed by MS Word's internal web browser. This is also the reason why ClauseBuddy works in Word for Windows, Word for Mac and even Word Online.
System requirements
All you need is a recent version of Microsoft Word for Windows or Mac, or Microsoft Word Online in a browser. Office 365 is ideal (as their applications tend to be updated frequently, so you always have access to the latest technology), but separately purchased versions of Office are also fine.
Note that Word 2016 does not support several secondary features used by ClauseBuddy. (E.g., reusing data fields, terminology and layout settings from documents previously edited with ClauseBase or ClauseBuddy.) See Microsoft's website for detailed information about specific version numbers.
Some very old versions of Word on Windows still use the ancient Internet Explorer browser under-the-hood, even though Microsoft has phased out the use of this browser for many years — and even strongly warns users to not use it anymore due to security and performance reasons. When your version of Word still uses Internet Explorer, you will see a warning within ClauseBuddy, because some parts of ClauseBuddy will be suboptimally rendered on the screen. It is also not possible to add or edit clauses in such situation.
Deployment
The enterprise deployment of ClauseBuddy is in no way different than the deployment of any of the other new-style Microsoft Office plugins (often technically referred to as "Office.js" plugins, because it used the Microsoft Office.JS API for Javascript to communicate with the "host" applications such as Word and Outlook).
See Microsoft's resources:
- Deployment through the Office 365 admin center
- As a fallback (e.g., because for some internal reason the access to the Microsoft Store needs to be blocked) some companies and law firms use the technique of "sideloading" as a fallback. Learn more about this
You may also check out Stackoverflow for community-based questions.
