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Office add-in
The Office add-in can be distributed to users fairly easily, since no installation on the users device is required. In theory (if enabled) each user can just click on “Get Add-ins” in Outlook and install the add-in from there.
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It’s also possible to deploy the Office add-in centrally via Microsoft 365 or Microsoft Exchange, which is explained in detail in the following.
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Microsoft 365
If you want to deploy the Office add-in centrally to all or a certain subset for your users, there are two options. If required by the guide, please use this AppSource listing: Office Add-in in AppSource
Via Office 365 admin center
Please check this guide in the official Microsoft documentation on how to do this.
Via centralized deployment Powershell commands
If you prefer to use powershell commands, you can use this guide.
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Exchange on Premise
You can deploy the Office add-in on an Exchange server centrally, by using EAC or Powershell. Please read the guide in the official documentation: Install or remove Office add-ins.
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COM add-in
The COM add-in comes as an executable, installable file (.exe or .msi), which can be used on Windows computers.
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Depending on your environment, one of the following deployment methods can be used. If you just want to test the add-in first, we recommend starting with the “Per User” installer, as it’s the most easiest to start with.
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Per User
The per-user installer is the default download in the Jira admin area. If you quickly want to get started or distribute this to your users manually, this is usually the best option. It has the following benefits:
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Download per-user installer (.msi)
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Non-Administrative rights
To make it possible to run without administrative rights, our per-user installer installs itself into this folder:
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If you do not want this, and instead prefer an installation to %ProgramFiles%, please check the other installer types.
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Automatic updater
If you do not use a central software deployment at your company, keeping the users computer up to date is usually quite hard. For this reason, most popular software features an automatic update routine, which will keep the software up to date. Chrome & Firefox are certainly the most popular examples. For this reason, we also ship the per-user installer with an auto-updater. It will check for new versions of our add-in twice per day.
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If you want to learn more about the endpoints the updater uses, please check this article. |
Internally, we currently have multiple release channels which cannot be chosen (yet). As we are currently early in the stage of rolling out V3, we try to release updates more often (every second week). This will become less frequent starting early 2020, at least for users not in a fast channel.
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On Citrix / Terminal Server / VDI
To install the COM add-in on a central VM or virtualized environment, we recommend using the per-machine installer, which you can download from the “More Options” button in Jira. If you do not want to have an automatic updater in place, you can also use this option.
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Download per-machine installer (.msi)
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Port configuration
The add-in opens a local port to show it’s UI in a webview. In case this is restricted in your environment, you’ll need to allow users to open a port, like described in this article: /wiki/spaces/M365fJ/pages/2331510842
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User Data
This version of the COM add-in stores the user data (e.g. login token, preferences) in
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This will add a new file to the install directory (%ProgramFiles%\OutlookEmailForJira\useRoamingData.enabled), which instructs the add-in to write it’s data files to the roaming folder (%AppData%\OutlookEmailForJira). Please note, this does not apply to the log files, these will still go to local application data (for now).
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Updates
To update the add-in to a new version, you’ll need to download the new version from Jira. Please make sure to use the correct one (per-machine). You can either uninstall the old version first or just run the new installer directly - it will take care of removing the old files. In any case, the user data (login, preferences) will be kept, so after a restart of Outlook, everything will continue to work as before!
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Default Configurations
It is possible to add a default configuration for the COM add-in. Most importantly it can be used to default the Jira url to make it easier for the users. It requires a dataStore.json file in the Installation folder. This configuration file will get copied into the user-specific AppData folder on first-use.
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%Program Files%/Outlook Email for Jira/data |
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Software Deployment Tools
We create our installer using the “AdvancedInstaller” tool. We provide a bootstrapped .exe-version, as well as a bare .msi-file. You should be able to use either of those files with the most popular software deployment tools, such as SCCM. Both files support all common Windows Installer command line switches, e.g. /qn for silent installs.
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