After we released Office Live Add-in v1.0, we listened hard to your feedback both through the community forums and our Support team. What we heard is that you liked the Office Live Add-in but that there was room for improvement in these areas:
-
Opening a document from my workspace has too many credential prompts.
-
Opening a document takes too much time.
-
You need a “clean machine” for the integration to work well. Otherwise, it sometimes doesn’t seem to work and gives blank file dialog boxes.
Our investigation
As we looked into these issues, we found a couple of interesting things:
1) The behavior of the integration is highly dependent on the version of OS and Office installed.
Vista and Office 2007 behave very differently than other OS/Office configurations, which explains why some of you are seeing behavior that others don’t. Office Live Workspace uses Office dlls and network stacks within the OS in order for the integration to work, and these differences cause our integration to behave differently, such as how many times you get prompted for your credentials within Office. On XP, you need to click “Open” or “Save” for the dialog to pull in the workspace view whereas in Vista, the workspace view gets pulled into the File dialog automatically.
2) Performance partly depends on how long the OS and the service “communicate” on getting valid credentials for that user.
If we make multiple roundtrips to the service, it takes longer (and this is dependent on #1). When this fails, for various reasons such as network access issues or Live ID mismatch issues, you might see the blank dialog.
3) Clean machines shouldn’t be required. Period.
You are absolutely right. What you were probably seeing is a manifestation of #1 and #2 above. We are aware of one issue with the Visual Studio 20008 Web Authoring Component which, if installed, can cause your update to fail. While the workaround is to uninstall the VS component from the Control Panel, we are working on updating our install to circumvent this issue.
Finding a solution for you
One of the primary challenges is that we are installing bits into and integrating with products that have released, Office XP/2003/2007. As a result, we have constraints on what we can and cannot change (not to mention the code base is HUGE!) So we had to figure out exactly what was happening, why it was happening, repro the issues exactly, and then work with the experts to find fixes without breaking Office or Windows. Whew, no small task!
We have good news
We have taken all of the findings and with the help of the Office and Windows teams come up with a solution that closely delivers on our primary goal – to make integration as seamless as possible. We can now present to you a single package available as a single download, the “Office Live Update 1.1” which:
-
Installs the necessary performance updates so that we don’t make roundtrips, and makes the network stacks “smart” so they do the right thing for OLW
-
Installs the Windows Live Sign-in Assistant that ensures that logging into the browser essentially logs you in to Office, so you don’t get prompted again and again
-
Installs the new Office Live Add-in v1.1 which shows who you are logged in as right there in the menu flyout.
We have made this available in all our new international languages, too. Let us know how this works for you, as we are still working on further improvements. And, as always, we thank you for taking the time to provide your feedback because it really helps us get better.
Kavitha