iManage Work 10 & VBA Integration

Question: How do you integrate Word templates or Word VBA code with iManage 10?
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iManage 10 (iManage Work 10) is the new cloud based version of iManage, which from an integration perspective is quite different from version 9 and earlier. Previously from a Microsoft Word perspective you could simply add references to iManage 9.x libraries in VBA from your templates. We could then quite easily from VBA, call iManage to perform various actions such as profiling a document with certain metadata such as Document Type, Author etc. all by creating iManage objects.

With iManage 10, we can no longer do this. There is no out of the box COM visible objects you can hook into from VBA. What we need to do now is build an iManage Plugin using Visual Studio and the iManage Extensibility framework in order to customise and extend iManage 10 to suite our needs in Microsoft Word. The Plugin we need to build is loaded by iManage when Word starts and responds to various events by the user. This is a .NET assembly similar to a VSTO Addin.
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These are the high level steps to building an iManage Plugin:

• Create a .NET class library project with a unique namespace.
• Add references to iwto.dll and IWInterfaces.dll in your project.
• Create a .NET class for desktop extension, for example, MyWorkPlugIn.
• Derive the class from iManage.Work.Tools.PlugInBase.
• Implement iManage.Work.Tools.PlugInBase.
• Include the desktop extension host events in the Initialize method.
• Specify MAC addresses in the resource file (for sideloading).
• Digitally sign the assembly and build it.
• Copy the assembly to %localappdata%\iManage\Work\plug_ins.
• Register the desktop extension by adding assembly details to the manifest file.
• Restart the application to load the desktop extension.

If you have found yourself in a situation where you have Word templates (possibly with a custom ribbon and macro functions) with VBA that currently is hooked into iManage 9.x and you are moving to iManage 10, then let us know and we can help!
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Tags: iManage 10 integration Word VBA