Office Customization Choices Will Impact Management Costs and Maintainability

• Customers can create Office customizations using several technologies, but they should standardize on Office Add-ins.
• Other Office development technologies, such as COM add-ins, VSTO and VBA, may have limited lifespans and other problems.
• Office Add-ins use standard Web development technologies and are most compatible across platforms.
• Customers should take inventory of the technologies they have deployed that need to be replaced and which modern approaches are the most sustainable.

Several technologies can be used to customize Office apps and interact with content in Office documents. Office customization, defined here as solutions using code that runs within the context of an Office app (versus solutions that read and write Office documents or drive apps externally through robotic process automation or API calls), uses common Web technologies rather than requiring custom coding with desktop development tools. Some older technologies are being retired or will become incompatible with newer versions of Windows applications like Outlook, making long-term consideration of line-of-business architecture more important.