Microsoft Office add-in development
Success stories

We've been using Add-in Express since 2004 to link Outlook, Word and Excel to our hosted CRM system. Our Outlook add-in gives users the ability to upload emails into one or more records in our CRM system; it also provides the ability to download contacts from our system into Outlook to sync with mobile devices, etc. Our Word add-in makes it easy to upload Word documents into the CRM system and also to perform mail merges from the CRM system into Word. Our Excel add-in allows direct import of CRM data from our servers into Excel. These three add-ins are tremendously popular with our customers and give us a significant competitive advantage when we're trying to close new business.

We tried creating these add-ins ourselves but gave up after 3 months of frustration because the infrastructure and documentation for building Office add-ins was so poor. But then we found Add-in Express and were able to complete the first version of our Outlook add-in in only two weeks, followed by the Word add-in two weeks later. Some time after that we completed our Excel add-in in just one weekend.

What's more, our add-ins support all shipping versions of Outlook, Word and Excel, an important requirement because of the size and diversity of our installed base. Most recently we were able to upgrade our add-ins to support Office 2007 in less than a day. This kind of productivity is simply not possible without Add-in Express, and it allows us to concentrate 100% on the features that set our products apart from the competition, rather than the very complicated plumbing that goes into the add-ins themselves.

Because Add-in Express is so well written and documented, we've not needed much technical support, but on those rare occasions where we have the Add-in Express team has always exceeded our expectations. Our development team is small and it's comforting to know that if we hit any roadblocks with our add-in development that top-quality support is just an email away.

If you're developing add-ins for Microsoft Office you're simply crazy to do so without Add-in Express. The product pays for itself during every coding session and is backed by a reliable and innovative vendor that cares deeply about its customers.

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I have to admit I do LOVE your products! We have used the Add-in Express for Office and .NET for two separate projects. The first project was to create a program in Microsoft Excel to read the cells???and populate missing information. Instead of building a separate website as our GUI to find information, we created an add-in that put a button on their Excel toolbar. The button displays a form that allows them to specify which information is missing and what they would like to see. When they click Generate Report, the add-in reads the selected cells and creates the???needed report. These reports aid our upper management in identify important customer information which dictates the strategies we try to pursue.

The second project was to identify a uniform way of submitting time off (vacation, sick, personal day) requests and an accurate way of uploading this information into our back end system. Currently we just send emails, and keeping up with these emails can be time consuming, besides that we constantly have accuracy issues. We created another add-in that gave management and other users a button in Outlook. The button displayed a form that allowed them to submit vacation requests. At the end of the pay period management can use their form to read these vacation requests and automatically upload them into our back end system. We hope to create a bundle of programs that will allow our management and our teams to stay in a single environment (like office) and be able to pull reports and do other functions through the use of these add-ins to help save time and complete tasks all from a central location.

We have been incredibly impressed by the functionality of your products here at FedEx Technology Services! Thanks!

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We purchased Add-in Express to assist us in a rapid development of an Outlook Toolbar for our clients. We develop recruiting software for the HR and Staffing industry. In this industry, logging all communication with potential candidates is an absolute must to remain legal and compliant with the ever changing laws. We have developed a single click method to log incoming and outgoing emails to candidates and other contacts. In addition, we allow our recruiters to import resumes that have been emailed to them with great efficiency. We of course also allow easy importing from Outlook Contacts into our product.

Originally, we had considered starting from scratch, but it did not take long for us to realize the benefit of going with Add-in Express. The results have been all we had hoped for, plus much more. The product has provided us with a stable, reliable environment, and has reduced our development time to a fraction of what it might have been. We are already working on a new offering involving other Office products, and Add-in Express will be our tool of choice.

We are very pleased with everything we have seen thus far, and our clients appreciate the tools we have provided for them. When our clients are happy, we are happy.

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Let me tell you my personal experience. I am developing and distributing a clipart collection, including a nice integration in Microsoft Word. The target audience for the clipart collection are primary school teachers.

The development of the Word integration add-in originally started together with an external freelancer. He spent 2-3 months to implement the Word add-in from scratch, including an installer application. When he was finished I started a beta test with some selected customers. It turned out that the add-in worked on some systems, but caused problems on many other ones. For some beta testers the installation didn't work, some others had missing toolbar buttons (and thus couldn't access the functionality), for some tester the uninstaller didn't work, and so on. The problems were spread over multiple operating systems and office versions - it was incredible difficult to reproduce, debug and fix these issues. At some point I noticed that it simply wouldn't work. We didn't manage to solve all the problems.

I started to look for alternatives and spot your???Add-in Express for Office and .NET product. Since we reached a dead-end, I decided to give it a try. It took me just a few days to port the add-in to your framework. Once the port was done, I sent the new version to my beta testers. It turned out that new version was much more stable and solved the problems we had before. In the end we had two problems with the new version - and with some help from your support team we managed to track them down as well.

Well, it would have been less painful if I had used Add-in Express from beginning. :)

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I am software developer with freelance business on RentACoder.com. Your tool was door to REAL rapid software development for me! When you're paid not by hours but on???a project basis, it is very essential to cut any costs. Leveraging Add-in Express???saved me thousands of dollars!

Customers request that???the tool be tested with Outlook 2000 and higher. I don't have any resources to do that, but I have Add-in Express for .NET that has been tested in all Office versions, and I trust it to deploy my solution to old platforms. They all want their product to work on the Vista platform. Who wants to go through Microsoft's official guide to deploy .NET-based COM add-ins to Vista? Not me! I've had???enough of it with XP already.

I had a customer who wanted to deploy their C# Office add-in with MSIs only (without any third-party components or without having to install official PIAs). It cost customer much more than the Add-in Express license to work though all issues on XP. And when they moved on to support Vista they decided to stick to my original suggestion and bought Add-in Express for .NET. As a result, I always recommend my customers using???Add-in Express for any project that involves COM add-in technology.???That's a dozen or two for the last year only. Too bad you Add-in Express guys don't pay me commissions for developer licenses of my clients,???I guess I have sold half a dozen of them already :)?????????

By the way, thank you for your Outlook Regions feature! It definitely helps me win contracts. Just check out???these two screens: these Outlook controls???are mine with Add-in Express, and these ones???are from a previous developer. Feel the difference?

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It is rare that a piece of software exceeds one's expectations, but Add-in Express has exceeded mine. We create business applications that integrate with the QuickBooks accounting system. Our newest product is an Outlook addin that gives the user quick and easy access to their QuickBooks' customers name and email information. We have a lot of experience working with QuickBooks so getting to the data was not a problem. However, building the Outlook integration piece proved to be quite challenging. Not only that, making the integration work with many different versions of Outlook became unreasonably difficult.

All our problems were solved once we decided to go with Add-in Express. Just one afternoon of reviewing the documentation was all it took to be up and running with the tool. The program worked exactly as described and made the development process a snap. I recommend that anyone developing Outlook add-ins stop wasting time and use Add-in Express.

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Just in case you're not tired of hearing this yet, this is one of the best APIs I have used. I looked at building a COM / ATL shared add-in, a VB.NET or C# shared add-in, VBScript, plus automation for installation, and other methods of integrating our product with Office.???I created test projects and made a decent amount of progress from many angles, but all had major issues with supportability as well as development time, limitations, and working around many, many quirks of developing Office extensions using Visual Studio tools.

This toolkit exceeded my expectation. Even after watching your videos and seeing how the add-ins were created, and I got a working add-in with all the features I had HOPED to add within 24-48 hours! I bought Add-in Express just over a week ago and essentially have the entire project complete and ready for 'beta' customers (some internal testing already started last week). I completed most of the coding over one weekend! And no quirks to deal with.... everything worked as advertised. The integration with the IDE is excellent as well, very intuitive and easy to use, especially considering how hard it is to provide an intuitive development UI and not interfere with, hinder, or limit the development of additional functional code that is outside of the framework.

Anyway, just wanted to say thanks for your excellent tool. I put it at the top of my list as one of the best toolkits / APIs I have had the pleasure of using. And thanks again for the fix you provided to me, great turnaround time on something like that really shows you guys are great at what you are doing.

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Even the Basic version of Add-in Express offers numerous features, which have already made our work easier. We have used Add-in Express for approximately one year now to develop an OLAP-Frontend for Microsoft Excel and can recommend it without any hesitation. The development work for our product KeyQUEST CubeAnalyzer was greatly speeded up by Add-in-Express, and indeed made it possible to find a solution in a completely new way. We particularly appreciate the continuous extension of features as well as the very competent and quick response to our enquiries.

Add-in Express is very easy to download, install, update and use. The How-To samples on their web-site are the best things for the start. In about 15 minutes you will have your first working add-in. Without Add-in Express it took me two days and I just had a “Hello World” application. All objects and libraries needed for execution are automatically added to the setup project by Add-in Express. You don't have to look for them manually. This is a very big benefit because the time for searching up all these files is extreme, we know this because we have done it once before. A very important requirement of our software is compatibility with different versions of Microsoft Excel. To meet this point Add-in Express was very helpful. There was no need to care about compatibility because Add-in Express tested this before. All functions and properties offered by the Add-in Express Object Library are available in all Office versions.

Keep up the good work, Add-in-Express Team!

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Our product ToolbarToggle restores all the familiar toolbars, menus and custom configuration to Office 2007 products. Because all this functionality had been completely removed from Microsoft Office 2007 and much of Office is built upon 20 year old legacy functionality, we used our in-depth knowledge of Microsoft Office to bring back all that functionality for Microsoft Office 2007 users.

But regardless of our knowledge, without Add-in Express’s COM add-in SDK, we could never have succeeded. The Add-in Express SDK is so robust and stable and can quickly meet any need for any sized enterprise. Add-in Express was absolutely vital to the success of our Microsoft Office platform solution. Even more vital was the premium support we received from the entire team at Add-in Express. Every member of Add-in Express is incredibly experienced, knowledgeable and will go to any lengths to help you resolve any issues. Unlike many other 3rd party products, the Add-in Express support team gives real solutions – not off-the-cuff responses that waste your valuable development schedule.

Because of the immense power of the Add-in Express toolset, I don’t have enough room to share all the benefits of the Add-in Express library of tools and how they can bootstrap your enterprise solutions. Please feel free to contact me for recommendations. (Side note from Add-in Express:??? We do not publish Charles's email address on this page???for an obvious reason. If you want his recommendation, just drop us a note).

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We had the following business problem: Customers for our main real estate CRM product were asking for a solution to automate the creation of Outlook contact based upon requests coming from their website. The problem was that some agents were getting 30-50 web requests a day and having to manually parse out the contact and request info from the email and create contact records that they could then begin marketing to.

Solution: Using Add-in Express we developed an Outlook add-in that monitors the Inbox for new messages. When a message arrives it compares some basic filter criteria (can consist of subject line, from, to, body; and can be set to match the entire line, beginning or anywhere in the field) to determine if the message should be processed. If it matches then it will parse the email based upon 9 common fields such as name, address, email, etc; and/or 10 custom defined fields. In this parsing you tell it what to look for and where to save the data (all Outlook contact fields are available to map data into). The final part of this process is the moving of the contact and processed email. You can have an unlimited number of different profiles each with unique filter criteria, field mapping and folders to move processed item.

My using the Add-in Express components allowed me to focus on the functionality and not on the implementation of the add-in. I built a previous add-in (Active Agent for Outlook) from scratch and ended up spending a ton of time getting the basic COM Add-in functions working correctly. With Add-in Express this was automatic and I was able to focus on the core functionality of my application.

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A while ago we decided that it was time to upgrade our Office 2003 plug-in to work in Office 2007. In order to speed up development time, someone recommended that we use Add-in Express for Microsoft Office and .net, to take care of the Office development side of things. Using Add-in Express allowed us to focus our energies on the “under-the-hood” features and logic rather than “reinventing the UI wheel”. We had our first prototype working in a matter of days; a month later, we released our first beta version of the product.

When we decided to change the design of our add-in, we were again able to whip together prototypes at high speed, allowing us to concentrate on and experiment with different designs and approaches: we eventually evolved our solution from a classic File Browser to a more complex Internet Browser-based file browser. I shudder to think how long this would have taken had we not used Add-in Express! Add-in Express also took care of creating our add-in’s installer, with Windows Vista UAC management built in.

When we did run into issues, the Add-in Express support team was quick to lend a helpful hand. And the Add-in Express forums have also become one of our primary sources of reference for Office-related development, answering questions that we have not found answered elsewhere. Office development documentation is notoriously sketchy, but the Add-in Express library (and documentation) replaces most of the???information needed to develop Office add-ins. Our next challenge is to port our add-in to Office 2003, but with the latest Add-in Express release, which introduces Advanced Task Panes for Word 2003 and PowerPoint 2003, this promises to be a cinch.

This is a great product, and has our full endorsement. I will never attempt any Office-related development without it!

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We are a software house that produces software that integrates Excel with Sage ERP solutions, and we supply some major UK and international companies. We are in the process of moving our legacy VB6 code to VB.NET, and we needed a version-neutral .NET component to help build replacements to our COM add-ins and to provide a richer UI.

We investigated VSTO Add-ins. We found that these were not suitable because they are not version-neutral , and do not support versions of Office before 2003. Having to deploy multiple version dependant solutions across all our sites would be a real support nightmare. Also, we would no longer be able to sell to new customers or upgrade existing customer that are still using Office 2000 (they are still out there!).

We then tried Add-in Express and very quickly found it to be the ideal solution to our problems. It has enabled us to very quickly build user-friendly add-ins that we can deploy to all sites without worries about version dependencies. The documentation is excellent, and the samples are very helpful. The support is also exceptionally good.

We’re now looking forward to trying out the Task Panes functionality, which I?В?Р?йm hoping is going to solve another problem we have. We can thoroughly recommend Add-in Express. A great API with great support.

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I have developed Outlook tools and Outlook add-ins for six years. I know the hassle to write code which works in Outlook 2000 as good as in a brand new Outlook 2007. Usually it is a complicated task to develop such an add-in. Even if you just want to display a simple button in the command bar - without a deep technical knowledge you are lost.

One of my first projects with Add-in Express for .Net was the development of a tracking system for requests for a car dealer. They had the problem that they didn't know how many customers called and wanted to be contacted again. The manager had the gut feeling that he is losing money. With the help of Add-in Express a custom region was added to the usual contact form. In this region you can assign a request to a specific team member or a complete team. The employee has now a specific time to solve this request. If he doesn't solve the request on time then the central was notified by a pop-up within Outlook so they could react on this overdue request. This way the manager now knows exactly how many requests were solved on time and by whom. Furthermore he can calculate the support level better than ever before. When you see the first time that even good old Outlook 2000 can be extended by additional regions within an inspector or at explorer level then you have a big smile on your face! It's like magic.

Add-in Express makes it easy for you to develop and deploy your add-ins. Best of all it makes fun using the great interface. But best of all is not that it is working flawlessly. The support level is outstanding! The support team wants to help you every time you contact their support department. The answer is always friendly, straightforward and leads to a solution.

I can only recommend Add-in Express for every Office developer. Keep up the good work!

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We have been using Add-in Express components for well over 5 years now. In the early days, Office required a fair amount of 'heavy lifting' with some very low level coding. We were struggling at the time until we stumbled across Add-in Express one day. What a relief that was! The project took off from then and crept back on schedule.

Since then, things have only become easier. With the development of VSTO, we toyed with the idea of doing more grunt-work ourselves but this 'thought' passed very quickly! You'd have to be crazy not to use the Add-in Express components when developing Office solutions.

Our solutions rely heavily on third-party controls and Add-in Express is easily the best. After installation, you're setup in a matter of minutes with a starting template. From there, the API is very intuitive and easy to follow. Every time we develop a new Office add-in (17 separate projects now) we forget how fast it is to get a prototype version going. In fact, we have just used the RAD capabilities of Add-in Express to develop a prototype for a large contract which we have just won.

We have watched in anticipation the new features being introduced, and have found the support to be extraordinary. They REALLY know their stuff. The forums have been very helpful and response on the few questions we have asked has been immediate and complete with project examples.

Our success is largely due to Add-in Express. Overall, an essential tool for Office developers, quite simply the only choice in Office add-in components. Thanks to the team at Add-in Express!

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While looking solutions for integration with MS Office and we found a wonderful solution to our already developed idea which only needed a tool for completion. And so, as an already existing client of Add-in Express since April 2009 we can announce that, for a successful realization of a planned project, there is a need for "both the task and the tool". We now have them both. In the beginning of our collaboration with Add-in Express we supported the Add-in Outlook 2003. Over time we realized that we are interested in using other Add-in Express packages too - such as Add-in Outlook 2007/2010. By using Add-in Express we considerably reduced the time spent in development of the project.

We are grateful for the opportunity to complete our project. The eVerifier Add-In tool is an independent component of Add-in Outlook 2003/2007/2010 that is incorporated in MS Outlook e-mail. It is used as a means for verifying electronically signed documents, saving files attached to such documents and composing a reply to the sender of the electronically signed document. We have received feedback from our existing clients that this solution has been able to reduce the costs and time involved in running their business, as well as to lessen the difficulty and promote development. It inspires us and encourages the creation of even more new ideas.

We don't know what the result would be if we hadn't found the missing link in the form of Add-in Express but now we don't think about it anymore because the end result is clearly visible.

We can say without hesitation that our collaboration with the Add-in Express team was a pleasure and it was undeniably a great experience and an instrumental part of our project's development. Thank you.

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We first started developing our outlook add-in project with VSTO. We encountered various problems and difficulties. Not until we found Add-in Express and Security manager for Outlook, we were struggling along the way. Once we knew what these goodies from Add-in Express could do, we placed an order immediately and couldn't wait to see what we could get out it. It came out that these two software pieces bestowed us abilities to create almost everything we've always wanted to for Outlook projects.

As my R&D team worked along the way, they found it is amazingly easy to implement our ideas and concepts into reality. When they got stuck, Add-in Express' support staffs guided us through and the tutorials on their website also saved us hours of wondering what was wrong?

We were lucky that we did not go for some "free alternative" solutions elsewhere and went straight to Add-in Express. Tell you what? It is worth every penny of investment we put on Add-in Express developer software. Honestly, you can count on it if your time is precious.

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