Are you thinking of buying Add-in Express? Have any hesitations or doubts at the moment? This is normal, we all weigh pros and cons before making the purchase decision. This page will definitely help, no marketing blurb here, just real stories from real people, starting from freelance developers, microISVs and small business owners to top-ranking managers of big companies. After you are done, you will hardly need any more arguments in favor of Add-in Express :)
If you already use Add-in Express, don't hesitate to share your story of success.
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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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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Joe Zuffoletto, President
SmartCompany
I have to admit I do LOVE your products! We have used the Add-in Express for Office and .NET for two separate projects.
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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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Micah Bell, Customer Technology Advisor
FedEx Services
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.
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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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LJ Morris, CTO
SmartSearch Inc.
Let me tell you my personal experience. I am developing and distributing a clipart collection, including a nice integration in Microsoft Word.
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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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Fabian R?ken, Founder
Arbeitsblatt Profi
I am software developer with freelance business. 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.
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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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Stan Chevski, Freelance software developer
RentACoder.com
It is rare that a piece of software exceeds one's expectations, but Add-in Express has exceeded mine. The program worked exactly as described and made the development process a snap.
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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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Jeff Richmond, CTO
Computer Solutions Engineering
This toolkit exceeded my expectation, even after watching your videos and seeing how the add-ins were created, and I had a working add-in with all the features I had hoped to add within 24-48 hours!
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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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Patrick Kelly, Senior Software Developer
USFamily.Net
Add-in Express is very easy to download, install, update and use. The How-To examples are the best things for the start. In about 15 minutes you will have your first working add-in.
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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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Alexander Dickbauer, Software Product Development Manager
KeyQUEST Marktforschung GmbH
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.
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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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Charles Steinhardt, CEO
TTBAR Inc
I built a previous add-in 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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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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Jack Bretcher, President
Sonoma Enterprises, LLC
Using Add-in Express allowed us to focus our energies on the ìunder-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.
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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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Martin Kirsten, Software Developer
KnowledgeTree
We 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.
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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?Â?Ð?ém 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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Sean Williamson, Technical Director
Codis Ltd.
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.
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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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Thomas Wetzel, CEO
Wisco
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 we forget how fast it is to get a prototype version going.
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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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Bruce Dyason, CEO
Business Productivity Group
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.
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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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Gatis Zeiris, Development Team Manager
Datu Sistemas
We were lucky that we did not go for some "free alternative" solutions elsewhere and went straight to Add-in Express. 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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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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Timothy L. Anderson, CEO
EVO Mail Server software production
The project was a success and delivered on time and within budget due in no small part to the ease of use and stability of the Add-in Express components.
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As Technical Architect and Lead Developer for the Vancouver Organizing Committee for the 2010 Olympic and Paralympic Winter Games (VANOC), I successfully used??? Add-in Express for Microsoft Office and VCL for the client-side portion of the Information Management System (IMS). The Add-in Express components allowed me to integrate my Delphi applications with Microsoft Office applications such as Word, Excel and PowerPoint and with Java web services via Microsoft Internet Explorer. The result was a collaborative document management system that blended the following technologies:???
- Microsoft Office
- Delphi
- Java
- Zope
- PostgreSQL
Add-in Express for Microsoft Office and CodeGear VCL???was used to integrate the Delphi applications into the Microsoft Office suite via custom toolbars. One of the primary requirements of the Vancouver Olympics was to leverage the existing knowledge of the Microsoft Office suite within its staff for the new system, reducing the amount of training required to deploy the system to the end users and improving the chances of quick system adoption while reducing input errors. All of the difficult work related to programmatically integrating custom code into MS Office was taken care of by the Add-in Express???components and visual designers, leaving me to concentrate on the development of my custom code.
Due to both the globally distributed nature of VANOC’s staff and the variety of MS Office versions in use, writing and globally deploying MS Office add-ins that supported all variants of Microsoft???Office was a difficult and frustrating task. By using the Add-In Express components, the components are Office version-independent and are very easily deployed via setup applications or MSI applications. Bundled into MSI applications, VANOC was able to deploy the Add-in Express-enabled client applications overnight and system-wide without user intervention, ensuring that all staff were using the same application versions no matter where they were on the globe.
The project was a success and delivered on time and within budget due in no small part to the ease of use and stability of the Add-in Express???components. Throughout development and deployment, not a single error could be traced to the components despite some very complex processing and system integration demands. On those occasions when I required technical assistance with the components, Andrei Smolin and his staff responded quickly and ensured that I was on the right path. In my opinion, the Add-in Express staff provide some of the best technical support in the business.
I highly recommend the Add-in Express for Microsoft Office and CodeGear VCL components and continue to use them in my work.
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Doug Filteau, President and Principal Consultant
Little Mountain Systems Inc.
Add-in Express components make developing with Outlook and the rest of the Office Suite just about as easy as it could be.
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Add-in Express???components make developing with Outlook and the rest of the Office Suite just about as easy as it could be. Yes, you still have to understand the Office Suite's occasionally rather unintuitive object models, but the support team are absolutely superb in helping you on your way (have a look at the forums and see how quickly most questions get answered and resolved). With some vendors support you always wonder if you’re going to get a response and how useful it will be – but with Add-in Express I have absolutely no concerns that my query will be dealt with promptly, accurately and with great courtesy.
We use Add-in Express components extensively in developing database applications for a number of our clients, and without exception they love the fact that they can have seamless integration with Outlook - it's been a big selling point. Most office workers these days spend a huge amount of their time with Outlook open in front of them, and having to switch applications to perform any kind of task is a nuisance. So why not make all or some of your application's functionality available inside the Outlook shell? Property Desktop, our enterprise wide database system for commercial property, now includes a comprehensive Outlook addin. This means anybody who receives an email from a business contact can immediately see the full record for that client, including current jobs, future possibilities, and even who else in the company is corresponding with them. It means that a huge amount of client-related data can immediately be leveraged and presented to the user without them having to do anything except open an email.
I probably sound like I have shares in the company, but I’m just a very satisfied customer. Really, it's one of the best Delphi component investments we've ever made.
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Richard Stevens
BOE Information Systems Ltd.
Add-in Express is the ONLY solution on the market that enables Delphi programmers to take advantage of the productivity advantages offered by Delphi to develop full COM add-ins for Office.
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I have been using Add-in Express since they released the first version. I was lucky to find Add-in Express when I decided to port an old add-in developed for Microsoft Word 97, using the old WordBasic system, to the Microsoft Word 2000 VBA system. Since then, I have been able to develop three new add-ins for Word and PowerPoint and I have yet three more in the pipeline due to be released in the next few months. In effect Add-in Express is the backbone of my micro-ISV.
Add-in Express is the ONLY solution on the market that enables Delphi programmers to take advantage of the productivity advantages offered by Delphi to develop full COM add-ins for Office. All the hassles involved in communicating with Office are handled transparently by the Add-in Express library, while I can develop the user interface and the functionality of the add-in using Delphi, as if it were a normal Windows application.
Furthermore, programming for the Office system is prone to encounter many glitches because controlling a third party system such as Office is a complex task. For that reason I really appreciate the superb customer support from the team at Add-in Express. They solve any issue reported to them in hours and they help locate errors caused by differences in Office versions and undocumented "features" in the various Office programs.
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Manuel Onate, Founder and owner
MomSoft
Using your excellent software, I have written an add-in that presents the user with a simple toolbar within what is now a template Excel spreadsheet. I could not have done this without Add-in Express, and it has proven to be worth its weight in platinum!
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Greetings from the UK! I’ve just put into beta testing some software written using Add-in Express. It’s been written for a firm of financial advisors who have, over the last few years, developed a mammoth spreadsheet that allows them to model a client’s financial position according to UK investment law (which means the model changes, sometimes rapidly, over time!), for both personal investment and for pension purposes. The weak links in the system (apart from the Excel solver add-in!) were a) the fact that a change to the model meant updating every spreadsheet for every client, and b) to get the investment portfolio information???required the manual transcription of every investment into the spreadsheet, plus a manual valuation of each stock, with all the possibilities of operator error.
Using your excellent software, I have written an add-in that presents the user with a simple toolbar within what is now a template Excel spreadsheet. The toolbar allows the creation of new models, the loading and saving of key client data to a non-Excel data file (thus allowing updates to the template to be performed independently of the data), and the extraction and valuation of the investment records from the financial management software. Several other functions have also been implemented using Add-in Express, the result of which has been to reduce the preparation time for each model from several hours down to a few seconds, and provide the ability to separate the data from the model, allowing the model to be varied at will.
I could not have done this without Add-in Express, and it has proven to be worth its weight in platinum!
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James Gilliver
Sinapsis Systems Limited
Creating the structure of a new Outlook add-in using Add-in Express takes only a few minutes. After that we do not have to worry about ActiveX any more, we only have to use the simple and well documented classes and tools of Add-in Express.
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We are small company from Germany, specialized in tools and add-ons for Microsoft Outlook. Developing Outlook add-ins was always a difficult, complex and time consuming process. Writing code which is fast, reliable and easy to understand and to maintain was nearly impossible. The native ActiveX interface of Microsoft Office is far too complex to support an easy and fast development process. The result was programs with complex code which were hard to maintain and support.
All these problems have been???solved since we started to use Add-in Express! It provides us with an excellent framework doing all nasty work in the background. No more trouble with ActiveX interfaces, no more hours of debugging to find the source of some silly bugs, no more late work because of some unsolved problems. Of course this is hyperbolical, but not too much. Add-in Express is not the holy grail, but it is as close to it as a programming suite can be.
The fact is, that Add-in Express has made our work a lot easier. Creating the structure of a new Outlook add-in using Add-in Express takes only a few minutes. After that we do not have to worry about ActiveX any more, we only have to use the simple and well documented classes and tools of Add-in Express.
But what really makes Add-in Express stand out is the excellent support! The FAQs are always up to date and are complemented by a huge number of great and well documented demos. If this does not help, any type of question will find an excellent answer in the forum. If even this???does not???help, you will get individual and intensive support by email. Far too often good support is only an empty promise, but if there is a company keeping its word, it is Add-in Express.
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Stefan, CEO
Priotecs IT GmbH
Our experience with Add-in Express has been extremely positive - it works as advertised. The forums have been very helpful and response on the few questions we have had has been immediate and complete with project examples.
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WRC Research Systems, Inc. has been writing statistical applications written for Excel since 1993. The applications have relied on Excel 5 macro language, VBA code, and C dll's. Over the years we have gotten increasingly concerned about the security of our code, since the VBA project password system is basically no protection at all.
While looking for a way to implement the new Office 2007 Ribbon interface for our BrandMap product, we discovered Add-in Express. This product allowed us to easily add a good looking and functional ribbon interface to our newest version. And it allowed us to provide a toolbar for earlier Excel versions.
Additionally, we were able to use our Delphi programming experience to make sure our VBA and Excel 5 macro code is kept secure until it is loaded into Excel. And while in Excel we have used Add-in Express's support for Excel events to further protect the code in the event of a "break in." Our registration code is now compiled and much less vulnerable than it was in VBA.
Add-in Express also solved another problem for us with our BrandTrend product. BrandTrend was initially a standard Delphi Win32 application developed specifically to produce trend charts of marketing research data. By using Add-in Express for VCL, we were able to develop a new product, BrandTrend XL, as an Excel COM add-in. Add-in Express furthermore allowed us to re-use 95% of our existing Delphi code and forms. Now, with BrandTrend XL, any data that can be gotten into Excel can be trended and analyzed by our Delphi analytic screens and forms.
Our experience with Add-in Express has been extremely positive - it works as advertised. The forums have been very helpful and response on the few questions we have had has been immediate and complete with project examples.
You can check out BrandMap, BrandTrend XL, and our other offerings at www.wrcresearch.com.
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William Cantrall, President
WRC Research Systems, Inc.
I asked my friend about some solution to my problem and he advised me to take a look at Add-in-Express components. That was amazing! It took me only couple of hours to understand how components work and by the end of the day the task has been solved!
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My teacher asked me to write an addin for MS Outlook which could parse specific incoming e-mails and create calendar events for future synchronizing with his smartphone. First I tried to figure out the complex model of interaction with MS Outlook and almost cried when realized how much work I'll have to do. Then I asked my friend about some solution to my problem and he advised me to take a look at Add-in-Express components. That was amazing! It took me only couple of hours to understand how components work and by the end of the day the task has been solved!
The time of support response and the regularity of adding new features really impresses me a lot as well as adding support for new MS Office releases. Since then the Add-in-Express suite helps me for awesome quickly and extremely effective developing extensions for MS Office.
In my opinion, Add-in Express for VCL is number one VCL component set in the integration of two great ideas - a Rapid Application Development with Delphi and a outstanding capabilities with the end-user's extensions for MS Office! I like to use it and I think you will also like to use it if you want to make some wonderful add-in for MS Office.
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Wu An, Student
Nanjing University of Science and Technology
We strongly recommend Add-in Express to developers in small businesses like ours and developers in larger firms. Add-in Express has kept us at the leading edge of software development and it is clear that our success wouldn't be possible without it.
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Recruitment Systems develops and promotes software to the global recruitment industry. As the Chief Technical Officer I have led a team of five developers to create our flagship product the TRIS Recruitment CRM. This recruitment database is fully integrated with Microsoft Outlook 2007 thanks to Add-in Express.
Our software development team have been using Add-in Express since 2004. We have found it to be a product with excellent features and superior performance. This product is backed by an exceptional support team who are always keen to help us if we have any problems. We often work in partnership with the Add-in Express to develop and re-develop our Outlook add-in. This creates a great deal of value for our clients and we benefit from greater customer satisfaction and better relationships with our 200 clients across 20 countries.
In 2004 we used Add-in Express to develop the add-in which is the cornerstone of our data collection system. The Add-in Express allowed us to develop the TRIS Outlook Add-in which saves our clients several hours of data entry time each day. This has given our promotions and product demonstrations a significant competitive advantage. Ever since 2004, our competitors have been trying to catch up with us.
In the near future we plan to rewrite our VCL Add-in to .NET. We will use Add-in Express for Microsoft Office and .NET to quickly get our software to our customers. As a relatively small software development company, we need the best tools to save time and get our products to market quickly. Add-in Express is one of these key tools. Without your product we may not be able to meet our strict deadlines. Thanks to Add-in Express we do not have to spend as many man hours on coding. This saves us money and also frees up our team to work on new features and products.
We have just upgraded to the 2009 version of Add-in Express which promises to be even more useful and intuitive. I am excited about the many opportunities this upgrade opens for our company. We strongly recommend Add-in Express to developers in small businesses like ours and developers in larger firms. Add-in Express has kept us at the leading edge of software development and it is clear that our success wouldn't be possible without it.
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Slava Barouline, Founder, CTO and Head Software Architect
Recruitment Systems Pty Limited
After spitting through dozens of HowTo tutorials and online message boards, Add-in Express's approach and examples mesmerized me and their components caught my attention. Was it really that simple? My employer was skeptical, hence, domain management and its tedious tasks were right up my alley, not his. I decided to give it a go and indeed, it was just as simple as that!
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As head of the management department, one of my tasks is domain management. Varying from buying, checking, updating and many other tasks, managing over 2000 domains is quite the challenge. There had always been those little but so useful features Office could not offer us and in the years we already got used to it: managing of domains involved many reoccurring tasks, which weren't only prone to errors but also took hours and hours of our time because of the fact we could not automate them.
At some point we even considered hiring an extra person to take care of the issues that Office itself failed to. Having a few years of programming experience with Delphi, I had read of the interaction between Delphi add-ins and the Office package. Building add-ins, which took care of our own specific problems, was yet another challenge.
It took me ages to simply create a single working button in Excel, powered by Delphi. After spitting through dozens of HowTo tutorials and online message boards, Add-in Express's approach and examples mesmerized me and their components caught my attention. Was it really that simple?
My employer was skeptical, hence, domain management and its tedious tasks were right up my alley, not his. I decided to give it a go and indeed, it was just as simple as that! I knew I was on the right track with these components but ran into a minor problem, so I contacted Add-in Express Customer Support, who responded the day after with as little as a single line of code and there it was: my first Excel add-in, which saved me hours and hours of work! Instead of hiring someone I now had my own add-in which I could keep on modifying, updating just as required by our team.
Mind me, this first issue involved searching and exporting results. Normally I searched countless (up to 25 sometimes!) sheets for a certain string, copied the result to another sheet, removed the duplicates and created a text file with all occurrences of the string. This task could simply reoccur 4 or 5 times a day. Just as my employer asked me to.
Currently I enter the search string into a newly created edit box, press the button and my addin searches all sheets, removes all duplicates and asks me whether to export the result to a text file! All within but a few seconds! Thank you Add-in Express, I'm already working on my next addin project!
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Paul van Bommel, Head of the management department
Stershop BV
Our first attempts to develop Office integrated functionality with Delphi cost us quite a lot of resources, and the developed solutions where most of the time hard to maintain. After some review of Microsoft Office integrated developer solutions for Delphi the selection quickly ended with Add-in Express.
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We are using Add-in Express to easily integrate functionality in Microsoft Office applications, which otherwise need months of studies, programming and maintenance efforts. Add-in Express works pretty well, and if there is a potential problem, then the forum and the support through email works great to quickly find a solution. Even if the problem is not directly related to Add-in Express, but due to a lack of understanding of the Microsoft Office internals, the Add-in Express team is of great support to solve the problem.
Our first attempts to develop Office integrated functionality with Delphi cost us quite a lot of resources, and the developed solutions where most of the time hard to maintain - whenever a new Microsoft Office suite is out, extensive testing and code modifications were required. After some review of Microsoft Office integrated developer solutions for Delphi the selection quickly ended with Add-in Express. The testing went quick and we were so enthusiastic that in shortest time the first application was ready and the customer was mostly surprised.
Since then we've had only positive experience. Problems get solved by a reliable and competent prater, Add-in Express Ltd. Altogether, it can't be easier than with such a long standing and supportive partner.
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Uli Garbe, Head of Office
uGarbe.de
Development with Add-in Express is a breeze. The documentation is good, with lots of complete source-code examples. The object model is amongst the cleanest I've seen, getting a document's DOM is as easy as doc = Me.HTMLDocument, it couldn't be simpler.
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When I decided to write an add-in for Internet Explorer, it quickly became clear that a significant part of the development would be spent hooking into the Browser Helper Objects, to get to the DOM. The prospect of spending hours fighting the APIs in C++ was unpleasant, so I started looking for a clean interface and stumbled on Add-in Express. My enquiry on their lively forum was answered swiftly, so I bought the product and was pleasantly surprised to have a skeleton add-in working in half an hour.
Development with Add-in Express is a breeze. The documentation is good, with lots of complete source-code examples. The object model is amongst the cleanest I’ve seen, getting a document’s DOM is as easy as doc = Me.HTMLDocument, it couldn’t be simpler. Creating my toolbar was a five-minute affair allowing me to concentrate on functionality and a pre-coded global class eases data sharing amongst components. My add-in, which allows you to remove unwanted sites from search-engine results is available for free at www.calvert.ch.
As I remarked on my blog it would probably never have happened without Add-in Express. Highly recommended.
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Maurice Calvert, Managing Consultant
blue-infinity
As a current costumer of Add-in Express, inContact, an on-demand contact handling solution, has been able to utilize the Add-in Express for Internet Explorer and Microsoft .net package to develop a custom agent control to integrate seamlessly within Internet Explorer. After evaluating various competitors, Add-in Express was exposed as the clear leader in this field. A short time after we bought our first license, we had a working prototype of the plug-in product.
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As a current costumer of Add-in Express, inContact, an on-demand contact handling solution, has been able to utilize the Add-in Express for Internet Explorer and Microsoft .net package to develop a custom agent control to integrate seamlessly within Internet Explorer. From the onset of this project, we were targeting an API or SDK to assist with integration into Internet Explorer; allowing us to focus on our core project. After evaluating various competitors, Add-in Express was exposed as the clear leader in this field. A short time after we bought our first license, we had a working prototype of the plug-in product. At this point, our entire integrations team works in some capacity with this tool (it is a core component of our projects).
After our initial success with Add-in express, we have realized the suite of products offered will be able to expand with our integration efforts - and as we target additional Microsoft applications we will easily be able to use the corresponding Add-in Express packages.
Ultimately, by using Add-in Express we were able to significantly reduce the time spent working in the IE environment; increasing our efficiency and ultimately leading to a successful project. We plan to continue using this great product line as we expand our own offerings.
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Lucas Milliron, Program manager
inContact
The Outlook Security Manager cut our total development time from several weeks to several days, saving a lot of money for our customer. Additionally, it has allowed the project schedule to be moved up.
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Here’s my success story:
I do a lot of programming for automation control. One of our customers is a state government that uses our services for their irrigation system covering a few hundred miles of freeways around a major metropolitan area. They've been having trouble with their sites being vandalized and equipment stolen. It's gotten so bad the thieves don't even bother dismantling the equipment anymore. They just haul away entire cabinets of high cost gear and rip out as much copper pipe and wire as they can find.
Recently my boss mentioned that it sure would be nice if we could fix the automatic paging feature that’s part of the irrigation management system. It was designed for irrigation alarms but we figured out how to tie intrusion alarms into it. I whipped out a nice solution, monitoring and correcting the invalid data stream. I intended to send the burglar alarm messages as text emails to cell phones but quickly ran into trouble with the security features of Outlook.
The Outlook Security Manager from Add-in Express worked perfectly and since the only other alternatives were to use other 3rd party solutions which didn't work or were difficult to implement, or to develop my own solution with my brain inside the nuts and bolts of Windows for an extended period of time.
The Outlook Security Manager cut our total development time from several weeks to several days, saving a lot of money for our customer. Additionally, it has allowed the project schedule to be moved up. Vandalism has already cost our customer over $200K and it's happening more frequently as the economy gets worse, so they’re very anxious to get things done quickly. The cell phone paging solution (made possible with Outlook Security Manager) notifies users of a break-in at any location within a few seconds so the police can be dispatched immediately to investigate. With many millions of dollars of equipment at stake this solution will definitely save them much more money than they have already lost.
The system modifications are not even completed yet and already people in my office and customer personnel are patting me on the back and telling me what a nice job I did. Thank you Add-in Express!
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Stan Wendle
Global Data Specialists, Inc.
I must say your converter application really works nice when converting projects from the old .vdproj windows installer to the new WiX installer. Just prior to discovering your converter I was going through the pains of "hand rolling" the conversions of 11 different setup projects.
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I must say your converter application really works nice when converting projects from the old .vdproj windows installer to the new WiX installer. Just prior to discovering your converter I was going through the pains of "Hand rolling" the conversions of 11 different setup projects.
Since we are hoping to standardize on VS 2012 for all of our forward and existing work we have a number of addition solutions and setup projects what will need to be converted so this will save us a great amount of time.
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Scott Graunke
Sterling Computer Systems
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