OWC9 vs Office 2003: What do I do now?

[Christine]

We have a component in our system that uses OWC9. We do not otherwise
require Microsoft Office. We recently installed Office 2003 on our
build machine, and that UNINSTALLED OWC9, thus breaking our component.

So the short question is, can we just reinstall OWC9 on this machine,
without breaking either Office 2003 or OWC9? If not, how do we get
OWC11? In my references list (VB6SP5) there is something called
"Microsoft Office Web Components 11 WIZARDS", but no OWC11. Of
course, we're always under time pressures, so if we do not have to
drop everything right now to upgrade to OWC11, that would be
preferable.

Any help is appreciated.
Christine Wolak -- Senior Programmer -- Axiom Corporation

 

[Ronny Ong]

Just don't do a default install of Office 2003. In any environment where you
are using custom Office solutions, you need to be deploying Office using the
CIW tool from the Office Resource Kit, so that you can control exactly what
happens. If you use the approach of "run d:setup and click Next/OK until
it's finished," Office 2003 Setup will automatically remove old components.

All versions of Office since 2000 (meaning version 9) can be installed
side-by-side with the exception of Outlook, as long as you install them to
separate paths. The default paths are already separate, so you should be
able to install OWC9 at this point and be done. (Well, actually you should
also apply Office 2000 Service Pack 3 or at least the security update for
OWC9 from http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=kb;EN-US;322382.)

If you happen to be using the Outlook View Control (which some people
consider to be part of OWC and others don't) you may need to upgrade your
references, <object> tags, etc. for the new clsid. Depending on what you're
doing with this control, you might not need any other code changes.

 

[Christine]

Thanks, Ronny - that is helpful information. We are looking around now for our copy of OWC9 (since you can no longer download it). I'm also going to post about where we are in our attempt to migrate to OWC11 - I'd rather go forward, if we can. Thanks again

Christine