Deploying Microsoft Office templates

This topic provides information about how to use Cognidox to deploy Microsoft Office templates that are stored in Cognidox to Office clients. Configuring the template settings across client PCs is a task for system administrators.

This feature is only available in systems where:

  • Cognidox is deployed on-premises.
  • Integrated Windows authentication is used.
  • Microsoft Office >= 2010 is used.

This feature makes use of Office’s in-built ability to load custom templates from a network location and present them to the user in Office’s Available Templates pane. For more information about this Office feature, see https://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc178976%28=office.14%29.aspx.

Template deployment is only available for Word, Excel and PowerPoint. Other Office applications such as Visio or Project are not supported.

In order to use the feature, the following steps must be taken:

  1. Configure Cognidox with a template category. See Setting the global template category.
  2. Add the templates as approved issues within the template category.
  3. Push out a registry setting to your Office users containing the Cognidox Custom Template Service URL. This can be achieved with group policies, the Microsoft Office Customisation Tool or any other suitable method.

This topic focuses on the final item, configuring and deploying the registry settings.

Note:

The Office template deployment feature is separate from the Cognidox Office Add-ins (there are two variants; see MS Office Add-ins). It can be used both with or without the add-ins installed.

Once a global template category has been created, Cognidox will make a template URL available which can be used in the deployed registry key. To determine your server’s template URL:

  1. Display the homepage and choose > Manage Cognidox.
  2. Display the About tab.

  3. Scroll down to the Microsoft Office Custom Template Service URL section.

    The template URL will be shown after the description text.

  4. To verify the template URL is correct, click on the URL itself to open the XML configuration file.

Each user who needs access to the templates deployed through Cognidox must have a registry entry in their HKEY_CURRENT_USER registry sub tree. This key describes a Provider Name that will appear as a section on Office’s Available Templates pane.

The registry entry must exist in a specific registry path. The general form for the registry key path is:

HKEY_CURRENT_USER\SoftwareMicrosoft\Office\<Office_Version>\Common\Spotlight\Providers\<Provider_Name>

The <Office_Version> is either 14.0 (for Office 2010) or 15.0 (for Office 2013).

The <Provider_Name> can be any name you feel is suitable for your organisation. In the following examples, we’ll use Cognidox as a provider name, but a value such as Company Templates is perfectly acceptable.

An example path for Office 2013 with a provider name of Cognidox is:

HKEY_CURRENT_USER\SoftwareMicrosoft\Office\15.0\Common\Spotlight\Providers\Cognidox

The registry entry is a REG_SZ (string) value called ServiceURL. The value for this entry is the template URL provided by Cognidox (see Determining the template URL).

The registry key can be deployed to users using tools such as the Office Customisation Tool (https://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc179097.aspx, available to users of Office volume licensing) or with a Group Policy.

Deploying the key with a group policy requires that a Group Policy Object is created with a User Configuration containing one or more of the registry entries (one for each Office version supported).