Excel Add-in 3.2 vs. 3.3 vs. 3.4

Stacey_Gibbens
Stacey_Gibbens
in Integrations and extensibility

Dear everyone,

I am part of the IT organization at my company, and I am responsible for the Anaplan environment from am IT perspective.  We are currently using the Excel add-in v. 3.2, which meets our organization's requirement to control the data in Anaplan (read only, not write-back).  My organization wants to keep the controls around data push/pull as is.  

I see that v. 3.3 has been released, with notice given that v. 3.0 and older will be depreciated as of May 31, 2020.  I also notice that v. 3.4 is being promoted as an upcoming release for March 2020 (but with no details shared). 

I have just done some testing with v. 3.3 and it does the job that it needs to do, OTHER than the fact that I cannot see any way to disable the ability to create a Read/Write connection.  Does anyone know if future versions will allow an administrator to control this behavior (as a setting during install or a registry edit or ...?) or if different versions will be differentiated by that ability?

I'm concerned that v. 3.2 may be depreciated without a replacement that allows for the restriction on the data Write capability and that will leave us with an inability to use the Excel add-in (which makes us sad....).   😞  Thoughts?

 

Thanks in advance...

Stacey 

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Answers

  • JaredDolich
    JaredDolich

    @Stacey_Gibbens 

    Just sent you a private email on this.

  • MagaliP
    MagaliP

    Thank you very much for using the product, and I hope you see the benefits.

     

    You are right: at the moment, there is no customer-facing option to prevent send-and-refresh in the add-in. As the security is based on Anaplan, the only way to prevent this is to make the modules read-only in Anaplan itself (either with model role or dynamic cell access). This way, even if the user creates a read-write connection, they won't be able to send the data back into Anaplan. Would this work for you?

     

    Alternatively, there is a setting that could be changed in the add-in and Support could assist you with this if you send them an email.

     

    We have no plans to issue multiple versions, some with send-and-refresh and some without, in order to work around your issue. This means the following version of the Excel add-in, and all subsequent ones will build on the existing functionalities and therefore have send-and-refresh enabled by default.

     

    We are however looking into additional security settings following this idea on the idea exchange, feel free to contribute: https://community.anaplan.com/t5/Idea-Exchange/Excel-Add-In-Module-Security-Restriction/idi-p/38440

    We have no timeline at the moment for this though.

     

    With regards to the deprecation of the previous add-ins, this is driven by a technology change which will prevent those add-ins from working in the future. We do not anticipate further deprecation at this point in time but I would recommend upgrading in order to benefit from the latest functionalities.

     

    I hope this helps.

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