When you have Office Routing Plus installed a user will choose to add recipients to the routing slip. How will Office Routing Plus know which email addresses to display as potential recipients from which the routing initiator is to choose? What if you don't want the routing program to show the entire global address book like the Office 2003 built in routing mechanism does?
The answer is that you will configure a simple text file to specify the Active Directory Organizational Units (OU), which contain the users you want Office Routing Plus to be able to route to. Want Office Routing Plus to be able to connect to your entire domain? Simply setup the configuration file to point to the top level Organizational Unit(s). Do you want to limit which user accounts and groups/distribution lists that Office Routing Plus will be able to route to so that users can't route documents to users or groups from certain areas within your organization? Just setup the configuration file with the LDAP paths that contain the specific users you want the Add-In to be able to route to.
You might be thinking, why not just use the global address book and display everyone as potential recipients? One possible reason would be that you would never want a user from a business office to route an official document to a student worker or an intern. Another reason could be exempting distribution lists. While some organizations might route a document to an entire distribution list or group, others will find that this doesn't make sense for a sequential routing application. Imagine the following document routing scenario. John Smith is the document initiator and he wants this document to route to Susan Jones and then some people in the Publishing Office and from them to a specific person in Accounting.
So he uses Office Routing Plus to add his recipients in the following manner:
The Add-In will gladly let John do this. When he routes to Susan and she chooses to route to "Publications", the Add-In will route the document to the entire distribution list. Everyone in that distribution list will get that document in their inbox. But from here, each of them will have the opportunity to route this document to the "next recipient", which in this case, will be Tina Fraizer. But there will be nothing to stop each person from routing the document on and poor Tina will get a barrage of emails from the routing system, each of which, will contain the same document--or maybe a slightly different version of the document since each user in the publications office could have modified the document and sent it on to Tina with their own modifications.
Some organizations which allow routing documents to distribution lists will get around this problem by coming up with a concrete business rule, which designates a single user in the distribution list to route the document to the next recipient on behalf of the entire distribution list--but there is nothing to enforce this other than a business rule that must be followed. But if your organization doesn't even want to allow for the possibility of this scenario, In Office Routing Plus (unlike the built in Office 2003 routing mechanism) you do not have to show the entire global address book as potential routing recipients; you can simply choose to exclude the Organizational Units (OU) from Active Directory that contain distribution lists.
Office Routing Plus also allows you to specify which fields in Active Directory your organization uses for the fully qualified email address of each user as well as the field used by your organization in Active Directory for the display name of each user. While most organizations use the Active Directory fields entitled "mail" and "displayname" for these fields, others are using different fields.
Below is a sample configuration file that specifies which Organizational Units to use for potential recipients:
LDAP://ou=employees,dc=somewhere,dc=com
LDAP://ou=managers,ou=groups,dc=somewhere,dc=com
Below is a sample configuration file for specifying the fully qualified email address and display name for Office Routing Plus to use:
mailname=mail
displayname=displayname
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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.