Office Customization Technologies Have Varied Futures

The Microsoft Office suite supports several development technologies that enable users to extend and customize the functionality of component applications such as Outlook, Word, and Excel. Most organizations customize Office to improve line-of-business processes, but the most widely adopted customization technologies are being supplanted by newer methods that are likely to receive the most attention in the future, and organizations need to decide whether to maintain old code or start new projects from scratch.

This report covers technologies used to customize applications in the Office suite; other services such as PowerApps and Flow, which use Office 365 components as part of a workflow, and those that directly integrate into Office 365 online services, are not discussed here.

Developing Office solutions

Microsoft Office has over 1 billion users, and nearly every organization has invested in extending the suite, for projects such as automating repetitive line-of-business tasks and transferring data between Office and corporate applications, using some combination of development technologies.