Customize Quick Access Toolbar, Ribbon UI, Office Menu.
Create Microsoft Office 2007 Vista ready add-in / plugin.

Add-in Express 2007 - new Office, new features and a new programming model

We are happy to announce that our Office 2007 and Vista game is finished and generation 2007 of Add-in Express is available right now.  Below you can find a brief description of the most important features and improvements offered by Add-in Express for Office 2007 and Windows Vista (including customization of the Office Ribbon UI, Quick Access Toolbar and Office Menu) as well as some new features for Office 2003, 2002 (XP) and 2000.

• Office 2007 and Add-in Express 2007
• Windows Vista ready solutions
• Customizing Office 2007 Ribbon UI
• Advanced Outlook Regions
• Customization for Office toolbars
• Bypassing Outlook e-mail security guard
• Version-neutral Office solutions
• Add-in Express 2007 packages

Office 2007, Ribbon and Add-in Express 2007

The main goal of Add-in Express 2007 is to support recently released Microsoft Office 2007 and Vista. This Microsoft Office version provides significant experience enhancement and a new functionality including the Office 2007 Ribbon UI (user interface) that can be customized by developers. Now with Add-in Express 2007 you can develop feature-rich, version-neutral, secure, isolated, deployable and updatable COM add-ins, smart tags, Excel RTD servers and Excel UDF add-ins for Office 2007 and Vista in the same way as you developed extensions for Office 2000, 2002 and 2003 with Add-in Express 2.x.

Add-in Express provides a RAD way to develop Office 2007 extensions and includes a lot of changes and improvements in Add-in Express classes and components specially made to support Microsoft Office 2007. Add-in Express centralizes all Office 2007 Ribbon related features in three components, ADXRibbonTab, ADXRibbonQuickAccessToolbar and ADXRibbonOfficeMenu, designed for customizing ribbons, the Quick Access Toolbar and the Office 2007 Menu. As well as other Add-in Express components, the Ribbon components are available through special commands of the add-in module. More about Office 2007 Ribbon components.

To create your own Ribbon tabs, to customize the Quick Access Toolbar or the Office Menu just follow these steps:

• Add the corresponding component (ADXRibbonTab, ADXRibbonQuickAccessToolbar and ADXRibbonOfficeMenu) to your add-in module (run the "Add Ribbon..."  command of your add-in module).
• Customize the added component through the Properties window.
• Add new controls to the Controls collection of the component (use a visual designer to do this).
• Handle events of the created controls.

Windows Vista ready solutions

Add-in Express 2007 offers the full support of Windows Vista and Visual Studio 2005, so all your solutions keep working on all available Windows versions including Windows Vista without rebuilding. Your projects built on Add-in Express 2007 are completely compatible with the strict Windows Vista security and deployment policy.

Customize Office 2007 Ribbon UI

Add-in Express supports the customization for the Ribbon user interface on Ribbon-based Office 2007 applications: Outlook, Word, Excel, PowerPoint and Access. Add-in Express provides a special new component, ADXRibbonTab, that you use to add your own tab to all Office 2007 ribbons including all Outlook ribbons, ExcelWorkbook, WordDocument, AccessDatabase and PowerPointPresentation ribbons.

ADXRibbonTab has all necessary methods and properties for customizing a Ribbon tab and its controls and, like other Add-in Express toolbar components, includes the Controls collection with a special visual designer that makes the Office 2007 Ribbon customization easier than by using XML.

The ADXRibbonTab.Controls collection designer shows and groups ribbon tab controls in a treeview, provides a flexible way to design your ribbon tabs, and performs XML schema-validation on the fly. ADXRibbonTab supports all types of Ribbon controls including regular and button groups; regular, edit, combo and check boxes; buttons and split buttons; labels and drop-down lists; galleries and menus; separators and dialog launchers. All Ribbon controls can be created and customized through the ADXRibbonTab.Controls visual designer. More about visual designer for customizing Office 2007 Ribbon.

Office Menu and Quick Access Toolbar

Advanced Outlook customization with view and form regions

Starting from version 2007, Add-in Express .NET includes the Add-in Express Extensions for Microsoft Outlook. With this extension you can customize the Outlook Explorer and Inspector windows with the Advanced Outlook Regions and embed your forms into the Outlook GUI. Advanced Outlook View and Form Regions are similar to Outlook 2007 form regions, but there are some essential differences between them. Advanced Regions work on all Outlook versions from 2000 to 2007, provide a more flexible way to customize the Outlook GUI than form regions do, and can be used for Outlook view and form customization. Version 2007 of the Advanced Outlook Regions offers the following features:

You can embed several forms into one Advanced Region

For version 2007 we completely redesigned the Advanced Outlook Regions' GUI and their architecture. It gives you a possibility to embed several forms into one region.

Look at the picture above. Now the Advanced Regions have a special header that shows the caption of the currently selected form, includes a list of the embedded forms and creates two buttons (Backward and Forward) for navigating between the forms embedded into the region. This feature is absolutely transparent for you. As earlier, you just select the region-host for your form and Add-in Express embeds your form into the selected region. You needn't care about other embedded forms, Add-in Express controls them itself.

New types of Advanced Regions for the Navigation Pane and To-Do Bar

In addition to form and view regions, Add-in Express 2007 allows creating regions at the bottom of the Outlook Navigation Pane and at the bottom of the To-Do Bar. More about customization of Navigation Pane and To-Do Bar.

Multiple Outlook regions in one window

With Add-in Express 2007 you can also create multiple view and form regions for one Outlook window, Explorer and Inspector.

Multiplied multitudes :-)

All points about multiple forms and regions relate to multiple add-ins. Now multiple forms from multiple add-ins can share one advanced region as well as multiple regions from multiple add-ins can share one Outlook window. Don't worry, all this is absolutely transparent for you.

It is what you have waited for

Finally, you can completely control your forms, move them between regions inside of one Outlook window; hide, show and close them. Now Advanced Outlook Regions are completely controlled by a developer, and it is the main difference between the Add-in Express Advanced Regions and the Outlook 2007 form regions.

Advanced customization for Office toolbars

In addition to the Add-in Express Extensions for Outlook, Add-in Express 2007 includes the Toolbar Controls for Microsoft Office. With this extension you can use any .NET control on toolbars of four Office 2000 - 2003 applications: Outlook, Word, PowerPoint and Excel. The current release of Add-in Express 2007 works properly for the Outlook 2007 Explorer window. The future releases will extend a list of supported applications for all Office versions. More about customizing Outlook toolbar.

Bypassing the Outlook e-mail security guard

The developers who have to support all Outlook versions starting from Outlook 2000 know about the Outlook E-mail Security Guard. Add-in Express 2007 includes generation 2007 of our Outlook Security Manager that suppresses the guard with a line of code. Outlook Security Manager 2007 supports all versions of Outlook, including Outlook 2007.

Your add-ins are version-neutral

All previous versions of the core Add-in Express were version-neutral. Now we are ready to represent the version-neutral programming model for all our customers who develop extensions for Office 2000+. Add-in Express 2007 delivers version-neutral Office interop assemblies. To use them, simply check the corresponding check box when creating your projects. More about developing version-independent Office add-ins.

Add-in Express 2007 packages

Currently we provide three different packages of Add-in Express .NET - Standard, Professional and Premium for you to choose a solution that meets your goals best. All the packages support VB.NET, Visual C#, C++ and RemObjects Chrome.

Standard

In addition to the core Add-in Express, the Standard package includes two extensions - the Extensions for Outlook and Toolbar Controls for MS Office and offers a 12-month subscription for our technical support service and free updates.

Professional

The Professional package includes the run-time source code of Add-in Express itself and that of two extensions mentioned above. In addition, the Professional package offers a 12-month subscription for our priority technical support service and new major releases.

Premium

The high-level Premium package adds to the previous level Outlook Security Manager and a 12-month subscription for our live technical support service (via Messenger, ICQ, Skype; on request). Besides, all premium customers receive any of our new products for free during 12 months.

Complete feature matrix for Add-in Express packages

Please note, only the most important new and improved features are listed here.  Please see the feature matrix of Add-in Express to get a complete feature list for each of Add-in Express packages.