Office Add-In

What is Office Add-In?

The Office Add-In feature in IFS Document Management provides a user friendly technique to handle importing documents to the Document Management application from Microsoft Office applications. Office Add-In is an optional component.

Prerequisites

In order for the Office Add-In to launch IFS Enterprise Explorer when using the URL option (see below), Microsoft Internet Explorer must be installed, but it does not need to be the default web browser on the computer.

Installation

Before installing IFS Office Add-In you need to download and install the Visual Studio 2010 Tools for Office Runtime which can be found here: http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?LinkId=140384

Office Add-in can be installed by clicking on the Document Management Office Add-In link on the IFS Applications Start Page. If the language of the system in which the add-in is running is supported by the add-in, the add-in when installed, will set its language to that of the system.

With the implementation of Office Add-In, a tab named IFS Applications is added to a number of Microsoft Office applications - Microsoft® Outlook, Microsoft® Word, Microsoft® Excel and Microsoft® PowerPoint®. On this tab, you will be able to find the add-in controls in the IFS Document Management group.

Configuration

The Settings option in the IFS Applications tab enables you to configure the language to be used for the Office Add-In. You can also configure how to start the application, the path to the documentation files and the local check out path. Furthermore, when this procedure is used for one or more e-mails with attachments stored in Outlook, you can select whether to save the complete e-mail including attachments, attachments only, or have the option of deciding each time a document with attachments is imported.

Language: The language that should be used for the Office Add-In feature. Change the language by selecting another language from the list. Click Manage Language Files to open the folder where you can add new language files.

Documentation base URL: The link used to access the documentation for Office Add-In.

Local check-out path: The local path into which your documents will be checked out. This value is the same as the value given for the local check-out path in the User Settings dialog box in the IFS Enterprise Explorer application.

IFS Enterprise Explorer: Defines how to access IFS Applications. This must be set up for the Office Add-In feature to function.

Select From URL and enter a URL (e.g, http(s)://<Server>:<Port>/Client/Runtime/) if you want to open IFS Applications from a link. Even adding the host and port only for the URL would also be sufficient (e.g, http(s)://<Server>:<Port>) rest of the path will be added by the system and launch the IEE client during file import.

Select From path if you want to open IFS Applications from a file in your hard drive or a network share. Enter the path to the file manually or browse to the location.

Save options: This option is only available from Outlook and is used when saving e-mails with attachments. This enables you to select whether to automatically save the complete e-mail with attachments or to only save the attachments. You can also select instead to have the option to manually select how to save e-mails when saving an e-mail with attachments.

Once configured, click OK to apply the settings.

Alternate layout

It is possible to configure the add-in to use the alternate layout of Document Revision but there is no user interface to change the setting. Instead, it can be configured manually in the Windows registry. To do it, start regedit.exe and find the following "key": HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\IFS\Document Management\Settings. Having that selected, there is a value on the right hand side named TargetScreen. This can have one of two values: DocumentRevision or AlternateLayout. By setting the value to AlternateLayout, the alternate layout of Document Revision form, if one is configured, will be used when the Document Revision form opens.

Uninstall

To uninstall the Office Add-In feature, click Programs and Features in the Control Panel and uninstall Office Add-In for IFS Document Management.

For more information about Office Add-In, refer the Create Documents from MS Office Activity Description.