Enterprise deployment
Updated
by Maarten Truyens
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 ClauseBuddy (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 nice 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.
Deployment
Unlike traditional desktop-software or the old generation of COM/VSTO plugins, there is no "installer" file, such as an .MSI file.
There is NO installer file, there is NO .MSI file and there is NO .EXE file that you can get from us.
As an IT-admin, you're now probably thinking that ClauseBuddy is being difficult or special here. But ClauseBuddy's deployment is in no way special: it acts like every other Office-plugin of the new generation. The only thing that's probably special, is that ClauseBase will be the first vendor of a new generation Office-plugin that you encounter.
Even though the "new" generation is almost a decade old (it was introduced in 2014), in practice, IT-admins are not frequently confronted with it, simply because the old-generation of COM/VSTO plugins are very difficult to convert to the new generation, due to a completely different approach. Most vendors that sell old-generation plugins will therefore deliberately stay silent about the difference between the old and the new generation, because they face such difficulties in rewriting their old plugins.
But it is a matter of time before the old style plugins will disappear. Already, the very newest version of Outlook for Windows no longer supports the old generation of plugins: see Microsoft's presentation. You can expect that newer versions of Word & Excel will suffer the same fate.
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
- Deployment through a Sharepoint app catalog
- 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.
Other resources:
- A somewhat older video from Microsoft, explaining the deployment options
- Other vendors explaining how to install their Office.js plugin (essentially equivalent to ClauseBuddy):
- iManage Outlook plugin
- CodeTwo Outlook add-in, including a very nice and detailed video
- Qlik.com Excel add-in, detailed instructions
- Verizon Outlook Add-in
- Infor.com Excel Add-in
