Trusted Online Catalog - SharePoint Required?

2
votes

I have developed a few web add-in's for Excel. For local development, I've simply used a shared folder to host the manifest (xml) files. However, I'd like to centralize them by having the manifests on my website. If I upload the XML manifest to my website, and use the path as the "trusted catalog" in Excel trust settings, it does not recognize the manifests on my site. Perhaps I'm oversimplifying it, thinking it should work that way.

I notice it says SharePoint for catalog type. I do not have SharePoint. Is it possible to create the necessary files that MS Office Excel is looking for so that it recognizes my web directory as a "catalog", so that it may then see my XML manifest files?

Ultimately, I'd just like to have a universal location for the manifests to read from so they work if I move the document to another computer, or someone else uses it --without having to package the manifest with it, setup a new trusted folder and so on. I'm not looking to sell the add-in, or even want it to be public really, so that's why I've avoided the MS store option.

Thanks for the help

1
office-js

1 Answers

0
votes

If you want to centrally deploy an add-in, you have a couple of options:

  1. SharePoint catalog
  2. Centralized Deployment

The SharePoint catalog is the older of the two but has the benefit of working regardless of where your hosting SharePoint.

Centralized Deployment however is far more powerful. It is included with Office 365 and, unlike SharePoint, requires very little configuration.

Without O365 or SharePoint, your options are limited to a network share or publishing to AppSource (aka the "Office Store").