Publishing Excel doc on shared drive

Publishing Excel doc on shared drive

• Chin Tian

  Daniel, thanks for the tip. If I am going to put this xls on a file server on our network do I choose machine or enterprise. I need to let all 150 users be able to access this xls from their workstations.
  

• BANG18

  Hi, have you configured the Framework's Security Policies on the other PC

  The error you get suggests that either you haven't created the appropiate security policy (by means of using caspol.exe) or that the policy created is not working on the right level (enterprise, machine, user).

  The easiest way to configure this policy is by having your dev machine create an installer that you can run on the remote machine. Just go to the "Microsoft .NET Framework 2.0 Configuration" console (should be found under the Administrative Tools Menu), navigate to My Computer / Runtime Security Policy, and look for the security policy that is making your Application Work locally (in my case it's located in Machine / Code Groups / All_Code / LocalIntranet_Zone / *).

  Then you can simply right click the Runtime Security Policy, and use the "Create Deployment Package" Wizard by choosing the right level (Machine in my example) and then running the resultant MSI file on the other PC (it runs silently, so it's hard to tell if the installation was succesful or not, but you can try and run the application to see if it worked).

  Hope this helps!

  
  
  

• Douglas Chor

  Have you updated the documents manifest See #4 below
  
  This is my experiance, with an Excel VSTO excel file on a client box and the assemblies on a remote computer.
  

  1. Client needed to be updated to 2003 SP1 of office.
  2. Client needed the download update from office update on the web which targetted VSTO on open issues on remote machines.
  3. Had to install Office 2003 Interops and VSTO runtime from the VSTO developers install and not individually from individual sources...why I don't know...
  4. Had to create a program to write to the excel files manifest to inform the document that it would be dealing with a remote assembly. See example here
     
  5. Had to use Caspol (in the .net 2.0 directory of windows) to inform the security issues of .Net that remote assemblies at the remote location could be fully trusted.

  For steps 4/5 you can see excellent documentation on "Visual Studio 2005 ... Quick Start #3: Deploying a Document to a Local Folder, and an Assembly to a Network Folder"
  
  Good luck.
  
  
  

• Mike Fang

  Hi,

  Normally, for a network deployment like the one you mention, you can use the Machine Level at the LocalIntranet_Zone with a Condition of URL type.

  It also looks like you have to apply a Policy for the document itself (*.doc) since it's going to be opened from an external folder.
  Please check out the guide in the VSTO2 Blog for an example on how to do this (see the Setting Security Policy part at the end).

  Once you have this running fine on your machine you can use the method I commented on my last post to create the MSI installer, so you can easily deploy to the 150 client machines.

  Please tell us if it works!

  
  
  

• senordotnet

  I was able to get this to work using your suggestion to right-click on the Runtime Security Policy and to create an MSI file. Question: Is it possible to wrap up the VSTO runtime, Office 2003 Redist Primary Interop Assemblies, and .NET Framework 2.0 into the MSI
  

• Howard Lung

  Hi, I'm glad that the MSI idea worked fine.

  I don't have much experience with installers, but I think that the MSI that installs the policies can't be modified. I have to admit that I'm not really sure about this.

  Nevertheless, you should be able to create your own Setup Project using Visual Studio, so that it installs the .NET Framework, VSTO Runtime, PIAS and any other MSI you want (like the policies one) as personalized prerequisites for your solution.

  I found this nice article explaining how to do it:

  http://msdn.microsoft.com/library/default.asp url=/library/en-us/odc_vsto2005_ta/html/OfficeVSTOWindowsInstallerWalkthrough.asp

  Just look for the paragraph called: Using Windows Installer to Deploy a Visual Studio 2005 Tools for Office Solution.

  I'm sorry if I'm not of much help on this subject, but hopefully the article may give you a headstart on what you want to do.

  
  
  
• Publishing Excel doc on shared drive