Considerations when developing an integrated product for Microsoft Office suite

Question

I have a product idea that requires integration into the Microsoft Office suite.

Are there any licensing/limitation issues to be aware of for me to proceed?

Answer 1

Depends...

If your product uses their published APIs and you don't ship any components of theirs "in your box" then you are (probably) just a value added supplier on top of their platform. You would be telling your customers to have the appropriate MS products in place and then install your App over the top. That approach is fine and the only reason you need to tell MS is because you will get a lot more business if you are a preferred/certified supplier/partner. (Depending on which product(s) you are integrating with you should check on MS to make sure that there are no specific license terms around using them).

If you put any of their code in your box then you have to make sure you are operating within the terms of their license and they will almost certainly make you jump through some hoops to get yourself approved by them. You also have the problem of sharing revenues which is not likely to work in your favour.

In my experience MS don't like doing this with anyone - regardless of size - and certainly not with really small players.

You may be better off approaching them directly before you start and find out if there are incubation projects that you could join to surface your idea.

Answer 2

I realised I have a technical answer for you too. About 10 years ago I wrote a plug-in for Excel which leveraged their spreadsheet to surface data from my provider. It was very successful and lived for about 8 years as a viable revenue generating product. It was a key differentiator for the BI company I worked for at the time.

The major headache in our code base was differences in API between versions of Excel, plus different DLL dependencies. MS like to say that they don't break their APIs between releases but this is not actually true. They may have got better at it, but it was always a real issue for us getting hold of a pre-release version of their new software to see what we had to do to keep ours working with it. Then we had to support several different Ecel versions and upgrade of our content between them. All in all it added a huge amount of complexity to our lives.

Their APIs have changed significantly in style, and Office is much more open than it was, but you asked for considerations and this is certainly one.

Answer 3

There arent any special limitations as long as you follow the published APIs. Hacking around them breaks Microsoft supoort license and no bussiness out there will want to buy your solution in that case.

Furthermore you should know that the Office APIs are a world of pain. Its a lot better with Office 2007 (and there's lots of cool stuff coming with Office 14) but anything older than that is just asking for trouble... then again, depends on what exactly you're trying to do..

In any case, you should check out some reference project like Duet (www.duet.com) jointly developed by SAP and Microsoft. I got some info on that on my blog: http://www.developerzen.com/category/sap/sapduetmendocino/

There's also https://www.obacentral.com/default.aspx