Supporting the unsupported Creative Commons Add-in for Microsoft Office.

Tonight I had hoped to be continuing the story about the creation of the Creative Commons Add-in for Microsoft Office. Unfortunately, after a couple days of downloads a few bugs have worked back to those of us working on the add-in. I thought I'd share the known issue list with you and where we are at with them so far.

1. Incorrect Non-Generic Jurisdictions - there was apparently some disconnect on each end of the web service implementation and licenses outside of the Generic jurisdiction were not working. The 3Sharp guys already have a fix for the add-in and the Creative Commons guys are going to tighten up the server-side validation. Of course, that means both of them are waiting for me to get the setup built and rolled out again.

2. PIA Dependency Problems - the Creative Commons Add-in is currently bound to the Word, Excel and PowerPoint PIAs. The tight binding means the add-in has problems loading if all three Office applications are not installed together. Bill Rosenblatt was incredibly helpful as we tracked down why the add-in wasn't working for him (It turns out Bill had Word and Excel 2003 but PowerPoint 2002, this mismatch of PIAs confused the add-in). I'm currently working with the 3Sharp guys to implement a solution for this problem.

3. Funky Wizard Rendering - there has been one report that the controls in the wizard are very large and do not fit in the dialog box. We are all pretty stumped on this one but Martha has an e-mail out to the guy with the problem so hopefully with a bit more information we'll track this one down.

Technically speaking the Creative Commons Add-in for Microsoft Office is an "unsupported technology preview". However, those of us that have been working on this little tool really want you to be able use it. If you hit any issues please send email to "ccfeedbk at microsoft.com".

Finally, expect a Creative Commons Add-in for Microsoft Office v1.0.1 release soon that will address issue #1 above and hopefully fix #2 as well. I'll post more updates on my blog as soon as I have them.