Connect for Office is fully retired. The actionable workflow today is not how to install it; it is how to identify dependencies in your org and migrate them to a current tool.
- Inventory the Connect for Office artifacts
Search the Documents and Files repositories for .docx, .docm, and .xlsx files with embedded Salesforce queries or merge tokens. Sales operations typically keeps these in a Mail Merge Templates folder. Ask department heads to surface ones in personal drives too.
- Categorize by purpose
Mail merge documents (Word), data extract or sync workbooks (Excel), and ad-hoc reports run through the add-in. Each category needs a different replacement tool.
- Map each artifact to a replacement
Mail merge to Conga Composer, DocuSign Gen, or native Salesforce Document Generation. Excel data sync to Data Loader, Excel Inspector, or Power Query for Salesforce. Ad-hoc reports to Salesforce report builder or Tableau CRM.
- Rebuild the highest-volume templates first
Pick the three or four templates that account for most of the usage. Rebuild them in the replacement tool and pilot with the most active users. Move down the volume curve from there.
- Retire the source files
Once the replacement is live and stable, archive the Connect for Office files in a cold storage folder. Do not delete immediately; finance and legal sometimes want to reconstruct the exact document a customer received historically.
- Connect for Office cannot be reinstalled. If you find an old installer floating around, do not use it; it depends on retired Salesforce SOAP endpoints that no longer work.
- Embedded queries in Excel files break silently. The cells appear to have values but those are stale from the last sync; the user does not see a sync-failed indicator.
- Mail merge tokens in Word files use a syntax (<<ObjectName.FieldName>>) that does not match Conga or DocuSign Gen directly. Templates need re-tokenization, not just re-pointing.
- Field-level security has tightened since Connect for Office was retired. Templates that worked in 2015 may pull data that the modern user is no longer authorized to see; check FLS during migration.
- Some Connect for Office templates are stored as personal files outside Salesforce. They do not appear in the org inventory and have to be surfaced through department interviews.