The KnowledgeTree Office Add-in has been available for Office 2007 (Word, Excel and PowerPoint) since early 2009. It uses Office 2007’s Custom Task Panes to display a view into the KnowledgeTree Document Management System (DMS), allowing amongst other functionality quick-and-dirty downloads (both for view and editing) and uploads of documents straight from Word/Excel/PowerPoint 2007. This means that users don’t have to log into the web interface to interact with their Word, Excel and PowerPoint documents!
Office 2003 does not natively support Custom Task Panes. However, a great number of users (including KnowledgeTree customers) still use this version of Office, and it became vital that we deliver the functionality offered by the Office 2007 Add-in to these users. But how to emulate the Office 2007 Custom Task Panes in Office 2003?
Add-in Express, the third-party library that IMHO is indispensable when creating Office Add-ins, have developed their own implementation of Task Panes that can be used in Outlook, Excel, Word, and PowerPoint, versions 2000 – 2007. Using this technology, we were able to port the Word, Excel and PowerPoint 2007 functionality to Word, Excel and PowerPoint 2003. And to make the solution even more elegant, a single installer can be used for either Office 2003 or Office 2007, meaning we don’t have to maintain two different versions!
