Customers about Add-in Express support service

We have been using Add-in Express components for well over 5 years now. In the early days, Office required a fair amount of 'heavy lifting' with some very low level coding. We were struggling at the time until we stumbled across Add-in Express one day. What a relief that was! The project took off from then and crept back on schedule.

Since then, things have only become easier. With the development of VSTO, we toyed with the idea of doing more grunt-work ourselves but this 'thought' passed very quickly! You'd have to be crazy not to use the Add-in Express components when developing Office solutions.

Our solutions rely heavily on third-party controls and Add-in Express is easily the best. After installation, you're setup in a matter of minutes with a starting template. From there, the API is very intuitive and easy to follow. Every time we develop a new Office add-in (17 separate projects now) we forget how fast it is to get a prototype version going. In fact, we have just used the RAD capabilities of Add-in Express to develop a prototype for a large contract which we have just won.

We have watched in anticipation the new features being introduced, and have found the support to be extraordinary. They REALLY know their stuff. The forums have been very helpful and response on the few questions we have asked has been immediate and complete with project examples.

Our success is largely due to Add-in Express. Overall, an essential tool for Office developers, quite simply the only choice in Office add-in components. Thanks to the team at Add-in Express!

Back to short

We've been using Add-in Express since 2004 to link Outlook, Word and Excel to our hosted CRM system. Our Outlook add-in gives users the ability to upload emails into one or more records in our CRM system; it also provides the ability to download contacts from our system into Outlook to sync with mobile devices, etc. Our Word add-in makes it easy to upload Word documents into the CRM system and also to perform mail merges from the CRM system into Word. Our Excel add-in allows direct import of CRM data from our servers into Excel. These three add-ins are tremendously popular with our customers and give us a significant competitive advantage when we're trying to close new business.

We tried creating these add-ins ourselves but gave up after 3 months of frustration because the infrastructure and documentation for building Office add-ins was so poor. But then we found Add-in Express and were able to complete the first version of our Outlook add-in in only two weeks, followed by the Word add-in two weeks later. Some time after that we completed our Excel add-in in just one weekend.

What's more, our add-ins support all shipping versions of Outlook, Word and Excel, an important requirement because of the size and diversity of our installed base. Most recently we were able to upgrade our add-ins to support Office 2007 in less than a day. This kind of productivity is simply not possible without Add-in Express, and it allows us to concentrate 100% on the features that set our products apart from the competition, rather than the very complicated plumbing that goes into the add-ins themselves.

Because Add-in Express is so well written and documented, we've not needed much technical support, but on those rare occasions where we have the Add-in Express team has always exceeded our expectations. Our development team is small and it's comforting to know that if we hit any roadblocks with our add-in development that top-quality support is just an email away.

If you're developing add-ins for Microsoft Office you're simply crazy to do so without Add-in Express. The product pays for itself during every coding session and is backed by a reliable and innovative vendor that cares deeply about its customers.

Back to short

Our product ToolbarToggle restores all the familiar toolbars, menus and custom configuration to Office 2007 products. Because all this functionality had been completely removed from Microsoft Office 2007 and much of Office is built upon 20 year old legacy functionality, we used our in-depth knowledge of Microsoft Office to bring back all that functionality for Microsoft Office 2007 users.

But regardless of our knowledge, without Add-in Express’s COM add-in SDK, we could never have succeeded. The Add-in Express SDK is so robust and stable and can quickly meet any need for any sized enterprise. Add-in Express was absolutely vital to the success of our Microsoft Office platform solution. Even more vital was the premium support we received from the entire team at Add-in Express. Every member of Add-in Express is incredibly experienced, knowledgeable and will go to any lengths to help you resolve any issues. Unlike many other 3rd party products, the Add-in Express support team gives real solutions – not off-the-cuff responses that waste your valuable development schedule.

Because of the immense power of the Add-in Express toolset, I don’t have enough room to share all the benefits of the Add-in Express library of tools and how they can bootstrap your enterprise solutions. Please feel free to contact me for recommendations. (Side note from Add-in Express:??? We do not publish Charles's email address on this page???for an obvious reason. If you want his recommendation, just drop us a note).

Back to short

I have developed Outlook tools and Outlook add-ins for six years. I know the hassle to write code which works in Outlook 2000 as good as in a brand new Outlook 2007. Usually it is a complicated task to develop such an add-in. Even if you just want to display a simple button in the command bar - without a deep technical knowledge you are lost.

One of my first projects with Add-in Express for .Net was the development of a tracking system for requests for a car dealer. They had the problem that they didn't know how many customers called and wanted to be contacted again. The manager had the gut feeling that he is losing money. With the help of Add-in Express a custom region was added to the usual contact form. In this region you can assign a request to a specific team member or a complete team. The employee has now a specific time to solve this request. If he doesn't solve the request on time then the central was notified by a pop-up within Outlook so they could react on this overdue request. This way the manager now knows exactly how many requests were solved on time and by whom. Furthermore he can calculate the support level better than ever before. When you see the first time that even good old Outlook 2000 can be extended by additional regions within an inspector or at explorer level then you have a big smile on your face! It's like magic.

Add-in Express makes it easy for you to develop and deploy your add-ins. Best of all it makes fun using the great interface. But best of all is not that it is working flawlessly. The support level is outstanding! The support team wants to help you every time you contact their support department. The answer is always friendly, straightforward and leads to a solution.

I can only recommend Add-in Express for every Office developer. Keep up the good work!

Back to short

A while ago we decided that it was time to upgrade our Office 2003 plug-in to work in Office 2007. In order to speed up development time, someone recommended that we use Add-in Express for Microsoft Office and .net, to take care of the Office development side of things. Using Add-in Express allowed us to focus our energies on the “under-the-hood” features and logic rather than “reinventing the UI wheel”. We had our first prototype working in a matter of days; a month later, we released our first beta version of the product.

When we decided to change the design of our add-in, we were again able to whip together prototypes at high speed, allowing us to concentrate on and experiment with different designs and approaches: we eventually evolved our solution from a classic File Browser to a more complex Internet Browser-based file browser. I shudder to think how long this would have taken had we not used Add-in Express! Add-in Express also took care of creating our add-in’s installer, with Windows Vista UAC management built in.

When we did run into issues, the Add-in Express support team was quick to lend a helpful hand. And the Add-in Express forums have also become one of our primary sources of reference for Office-related development, answering questions that we have not found answered elsewhere. Office development documentation is notoriously sketchy, but the Add-in Express library (and documentation) replaces most of the???information needed to develop Office add-ins. Our next challenge is to port our add-in to Office 2003, but with the latest Add-in Express release, which introduces Advanced Task Panes for Word 2003 and PowerPoint 2003, this promises to be a cinch.

This is a great product, and has our full endorsement. I will never attempt any Office-related development without it!

Back to short

Add-in Express???components make developing with Outlook and the rest of the Office Suite just about as easy as it could be. Yes, you still have to understand the Office Suite's occasionally rather unintuitive object models, but the support team are absolutely superb in helping you on your way (have a look at the forums and see how quickly most questions get answered and resolved). With some vendors support you always wonder if you’re going to get a response and how useful it will be – but with Add-in Express I have absolutely no concerns that my query will be dealt with promptly, accurately and with great courtesy.

We use Add-in Express components extensively in developing database applications for a number of our clients, and without exception they love the fact that they can have seamless integration with Outlook - it's been a big selling point. Most office workers these days spend a huge amount of their time with Outlook open in front of them, and having to switch applications to perform any kind of task is a nuisance. So why not make all or some of your application's functionality available inside the Outlook shell? Property Desktop, our enterprise wide database system for commercial property, now includes a comprehensive Outlook addin. This means anybody who receives an email from a business contact can immediately see the full record for that client, including current jobs, future possibilities, and even who else in the company is corresponding with them. It means that a huge amount of client-related data can immediately be leveraged and presented to the user without them having to do anything except open an email.

I probably sound like I have shares in the company, but I’m just a very satisfied customer. Really, it's one of the best Delphi component investments we've ever made.

Back to short

As Technical Architect and Lead Developer for the Vancouver Organizing Committee for the 2010 Olympic and Paralympic Winter Games (VANOC), I successfully used??? Add-in Express for Microsoft Office and VCL for the client-side portion of the Information Management System (IMS). The Add-in Express components allowed me to integrate my Delphi applications with Microsoft Office applications such as Word, Excel and PowerPoint and with Java web services via Microsoft Internet Explorer. The result was a collaborative document management system that blended the following technologies:???

• Microsoft Office
• Delphi
• Java
• Zope
• PostgreSQL

Add-in Express for Microsoft Office and CodeGear VCL???was used to integrate the Delphi applications into the Microsoft Office suite via custom toolbars. One of the primary requirements of the Vancouver Olympics was to leverage the existing knowledge of the Microsoft Office suite within its staff for the new system, reducing the amount of training required to deploy the system to the end users and improving the chances of quick system adoption while reducing input errors. All of the difficult work related to programmatically integrating custom code into MS Office was taken care of by the Add-in Express???components and visual designers, leaving me to concentrate on the development of my custom code.

Due to both the globally distributed nature of VANOC’s staff and the variety of MS Office versions in use, writing and globally deploying MS Office add-ins that supported all variants of Microsoft???Office was a difficult and frustrating task. By using the Add-In Express components, the components are Office version-independent and are very easily deployed via setup applications or MSI applications. Bundled into MSI applications, VANOC was able to deploy the Add-in Express-enabled client applications overnight and system-wide without user intervention, ensuring that all staff were using the same application versions no matter where they were on the globe.

The project was a success and delivered on time and within budget due in no small part to the ease of use and stability of the Add-in Express???components. Throughout development and deployment, not a single error could be traced to the components despite some very complex processing and system integration demands. On those occasions when I required technical assistance with the components, Andrei Smolin and his staff responded quickly and ensured that I was on the right path. In my opinion, the Add-in Express staff provide some of the best technical support in the business.

I highly recommend the Add-in Express for Microsoft Office and CodeGear VCL components and continue to use them in my work.

Back to short

I have been using Add-in Express since they released the first version. I was lucky to find Add-in Express when I decided to port an old add-in developed for Microsoft Word 97, using the old WordBasic system, to the Microsoft Word 2000 VBA system. Since then, I have been able to develop three new add-ins for Word and PowerPoint and I have yet three more in the pipeline due to be released in the next few months. In effect Add-in Express is the backbone of my micro-ISV.

Add-in Express is the ONLY solution on the market that enables Delphi programmers to take advantage of the productivity advantages offered by Delphi to develop full COM add-ins for Office. All the hassles involved in communicating with Office are handled transparently by the Add-in Express library, while I can develop the user interface and the functionality of the add-in using Delphi, as if it were a normal Windows application.

Furthermore, programming for the Office system is prone to encounter many glitches because controlling a third party system such as Office is a complex task. For that reason I really appreciate the superb customer support from the team at Add-in Express. They solve any issue reported to them in hours and they help locate errors caused by differences in Office versions and undocumented "features" in the various Office programs.

Back to short

As head of the management department, one of my tasks is domain management. Varying from buying, checking, updating and many other tasks, managing over 2000 domains is quite the challenge. There had always been those little but so useful features Office could not offer us and in the years we already got used to it: managing of domains involved many reoccurring tasks, which weren't only prone to errors but also took hours and hours of our time because of the fact we could not automate them.

At some point we even considered hiring an extra person to take care of the issues that Office itself failed to. Having a few years of programming experience with Delphi, I had read of the interaction between Delphi add-ins and the Office package. Building add-ins, which took care of our own specific problems, was yet another challenge.

It took me ages to simply create a single working button in Excel, powered by Delphi. After spitting through dozens of HowTo tutorials and online message boards, Add-in Express's approach and examples mesmerized me and their components caught my attention. Was it really that simple?

My employer was skeptical, hence, domain management and its tedious tasks were right up my alley, not his. I decided to give it a go and indeed, it was just as simple as that! I knew I was on the right track with these components but ran into a minor problem, so I contacted Add-in Express Customer Support, who responded the day after with as little as a single line of code and there it was: my first Excel add-in, which saved me hours and hours of work! Instead of hiring someone I now had my own add-in which I could keep on modifying, updating just as required by our team.

Mind me, this first issue involved searching and exporting results. Normally I searched countless (up to 25 sometimes!) sheets for a certain string, copied the result to another sheet, removed the duplicates and created a text file with all occurrences of the string. This task could simply reoccur 4 or 5 times a day. Just as my employer asked me to.

Currently I enter the search string into a newly created edit box, press the button and my addin searches all sheets, removes all duplicates and asks me whether to export the result to a text file! All within but a few seconds! Thank you Add-in Express, I'm already working on my next addin project!

Back to short

We are small company from Germany, specialized in tools and add-ons for Microsoft Outlook. Developing Outlook add-ins was always a difficult, complex and time consuming process. Writing code which is fast, reliable and easy to understand and to maintain was nearly impossible. The native ActiveX interface of Microsoft Office is far too complex to support an easy and fast development process. The result was programs with complex code which were hard to maintain and support.

All these problems have been???solved since we started to use Add-in Express! It provides us with an excellent framework doing all nasty work in the background. No more trouble with ActiveX interfaces, no more hours of debugging to find the source of some silly bugs, no more late work because of some unsolved problems. Of course this is hyperbolical, but not too much. Add-in Express is not the holy grail, but it is as close to it as a programming suite can be.

The fact is, that Add-in Express has made our work a lot easier. Creating the structure of a new Outlook add-in using Add-in Express takes only a few minutes. After that we do not have to worry about ActiveX any more, we only have to use the simple and well documented classes and tools of Add-in Express.

But what really makes Add-in Express stand out is the excellent support! The FAQs are always up to date and are complemented by a huge number of great and well documented demos. If this does not help, any type of question will find an excellent answer in the forum. If even this???does not???help, you will get individual and intensive support by email. Far too often good support is only an empty promise, but if there is a company keeping its word, it is Add-in Express.

Back to short

Davton have been creating custom business solutions for Microsoft Outlook for a number of years. Since discovering Add-in Express, we have been able to focus on the business end of the process and not worry about the actual integration.

We love ClickTwice installation, and your forum is invaluable. I hope we manage to match your level of customer service for our own customers - its truly awesome.

We use Add-in Express on all our add-ins now. Our latest product - MailChimp provides synchronisation between the MailChimp email marketing lists, and Outlook contacts lists.

Back to short

Embarking on our first Office add-in it soon became apparent that Office Active-X development was convoluted and very time consuming. Add-in Express is a powerful suite of tools for the automatic creation of add-in for Microsoft Office products. The suite enabled us to quickly create complex add-ins within Outlook without worrying about any low level development or management of the add-in. I estimate this tool has saved us many weeks of coding.

Premium support from Add-in Express Team has been incredible, every problem we have had has been solved within a very short time-frame. New ideas and improvements have been considered and implemented quickly, it is great that they actually listen and respond to customers. This is how support should be!

Back to short

Your product opened the door to an entire new way to implement our top down editing approach. Best of all, the access to new customers required only a small amount of new code to be witten. It took only days to have several new applications to sell. Hats off to your developers.

As good as your prodct is, your support is even better. Andrei Smolin is both knowledgable and patient. He is the reason I am and will continue to be your customer.

I have run software development companies for over twenty years and know great customer support and solid code is the only way to go. Your company scores high marks in both areas.

Back to short

I just have to say that the Premium Support Service Subscription is one of the best support functions I have ever come across. Your team do fantastic work, with both the product but also supporting it with samples.

Just thought you should know.

Back to short