Small and large organizations alike have relied on the built in routing feature in Microsoft Office 2003 products such as Excel and Word. Many corporations have used routing slips for years for routing of fundamental business documents such as timesheets, expense reports, contracts, and many other key business documents. In the introduction of Microsoft Office 2007, many organizations were shocked to hear that this routing mechanism was removed.
I work for one such corporation. In our IT office, we wanted to push out Office 2007 by the summer of 2008 but the number one impediment was this missing routing functionality, which was so heavily relied on for over ten years in our business offices. We explored many possible solutions, including SharePoint, and even just having the business office users simply email documents using just Outlook without any routing mechanism. Neither of these solutions seemed to be nearly as efficient or as user-friendly as what our business offices were using for years in Office 2003 routing. So, I began to explore the feasibility of developing and add-in for Office 2007 that simply replaced the Office 2003 routing functionality.
I first spent nearly two weeks scouring the web, in hopes of discovering an add-in that someone else had developed. To my surprise I could not find a single product, yet thousands of various add-ins for other purposes exist and can quickly be downloaded from various websites. So, I began working on developing our own add-in that would replace the Office 2003 routing functionality and, hopefully, even improve upon that functionality, since I was taking the time to create a solution that would be used by over 300 users at our organization. After three months of development I was able to do just that. The final product allows for routing between 2003 and 2007 documents (being a larger organization, we had to roll out our 2007 Office upgrade a department at a time for over a month and during this transition period, we needed to be able to continue routing between offices, regardless of the version of Office each user was using). The final product works in both Excel and Word.
After publishing some training material for the add-in to our website, we began to get some calls from other companies wanting to know if we were interested in either sharing how we developed the add-in or in selling it. I talked to my employer and they were willing to let me take ownership of the product I developed and market it on my own to help other organizations replace the lost 2003 Office routing. After some quick success in selling this product, I licensed a business and formed a small company (Integrity Solutions). We have been able to improve the product functionality, flexibility, and promotion. The product has become very popular and has been implemented in various environments, including Vista, Windows 7, Citrix, and Terminal Server.
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Windows 7, Vista, XP SP2
Excel 2007 - 2003 (for Excel Add-In)
Word 2007 - 2003 (for Word Add-In)
“ The Office-Routing Add-in allowed us to quickly and easily replace the lost functionality of document routing in Office 2007 without having to develop custom work flows through the Share Point Server – we have been very pleased with the results ”.
– Kent Smith, W.C. Bradley Co.
“ Thanks to the Office-Routing Plus Add-in our team are back in business routing documents for review purpose. Without this valuable add in, we would have to do the whole process manually which is going to be unsustainable. Thanks again! ”.
– Steve Yuen, IT Analyst, Johnson & Johnson Inc.