P2P

31 I L T A N E T . O R G B ug add-ins plague most modern law offices. There has got to be a better way! The problems are all too familiar. Outlook takes forever to load. Word crashes unexpectedly. Upon relaunch, the application either complains about a slow add-in or informs you that the add-in has been disabled altogether due to how it is loading, and you must now come up with a workaround. And this is just from the user's perspective, not to mention the struggles IT administrators go through installing these unwieldy third-party integrations, keeping them updated, and selectively disabling them in the course of troubleshooting. Now imagine a way to enhance the functionality of Office and integrate with legal applications, but without the bulk and instability of traditional add-ins. The solution is out there. Law firms continue, however, to put themselves through the add-in ordeal. Legal professionals need functionality that your standard Microsoft Office installation simply does not provide. Many vendors, big and small, have designed solutions to fill the gaps. These integrate directly with Word, Outlook, and Excel via add- ins (sometimes also referred to as plug-ins or extensions), delivering enhancements such as superior document comparison, detailed templates that automatically populate headings, and advanced filing capabilities. Desktop Hellscape: COM and VSTO Add-ins To integrate with the Office applications, these third-party solutions have historically relied on two add-in models, COM (Component Object Model) and VSTO (Visual Studio Tools for Office). COM, introduced by Microsoft in 1993, is at the basis of many Microsoft Office functions, and even VSTO add-ins depend on some COM components. VSTO add-ins are designed in Microsoft Visual Studio using C# or Visual Basic. COM and VSTO add-ins often cause instability. If two add-ins conflict with each other, they might not coexist peaceably on a computer. Firms often stack as many as seven or eight add-ins into an application. Incompatibilities lead to crashing. Updating and patching these kinds of add-ins, moreover, is not a simple process. Again, administrators have to worry about compatibility, carefully following an order of operations to make sure that the integrations play nicely. COM components often rely on DLL files, which have caused such severe integration issues that programmers have coined the term "DLL Hell" to refer to the incompatibility problems that arise when two applications share a DLL file. How many times have we seen an add-in fail to function simply because a DLL became unregistered? Due to security concerns, only an administrator can successfully re-register a DLL and restore functionality. Because they rely on the same local storage and processing power as the applications, COM and VTSO add- ins can slow down application launch times significantly. If, as frequently happens, an add-in is causing Outlook or another Office application to launch too slowly, Outlook or Word will disable it entirely. Finally, COM and VSTO add-ins are limited to running only on Windows locally. They can't be extended to mobile devices, web browsers, or Macs. A Better Alternative: Office Add-ins Recently we have seen the emergence of new hope; a more lightweight, easier method for integrating add-ins. Here at Kraft Kennedy, we've come to refer to them as "Office 365 Add-ins," though the more official—if confusing—term seems to be, "Office Add-ins," according to the Microsoft resources currently available on the subject.

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