Pushing templates to users PC's

[Simon Reid]

I am new to word development and have a fairly tricky problem to solve:

We have developed a plug-in that helps our users to create standard reports
in words. This plugin relies on a set of templates being on the users PC. At
the moment we send them via email and ask the users to detatch them, but this
is far from a great solution since it is unreliable at best, and means that
when we have updated templates we cannot garantee that people will be using
the right ones. For various reasons we cannot put the templates on a shared
network drive (one is that we have offices around the world, so bandwidth is
an issue)

Does anyone have any ideas about how I could solve this problem (I have a
few ideas, maybe connect to a web service to download them?), or any tips on
where I can look for more advice?

 

[Jay Freedman]

The last part of
http://www.word.mvps.org/FAQs/MacrosVBA/DistributeMacros.htm is
devoted to this subject. I haven't tried to implement it, but some of
the other MVPs have had experience in this area and can advise if you
have further questions.

--
Regards,
Jay Freedman
Microsoft Word MVP
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newsgroup so all may benefit.

On Wed, 24 Jan 2007 00:57:02 -0800, Simon Reid <Simon

 

[Jay Freedman]

I'm not sure I understand your objection to login scripts, but here's
another (untested) idea...

Create an AutoExec macro in a global template
(http://word.mvps.org/faqs/macrosvba/ApplicationEvents.htm). This macro can
download the latest set of templates from a web page. To minimize bandwidth,
the macro could first download and read a small text file in which you store
the URLs and file dates of the current templates. If the dates in the file
match the dates of the templates already on the local drive, then nothing
more needs to happen. If any date in the text file is later than the
template's date, the macro can download the new template from the
corresponding URL.

--
Regards,
Jay Freedman
Microsoft Word MVP
Email cannot be acknowledged; please post all follow-ups to the newsgroup so
all may benefit.