3745769 - 5.1.x / 5.2.x / 1.1.x: Microsoft Office Integration Addon not available

In SAP ECTR 5.x.x environments using the COM-based Microsoft Office integration (PLM++ Dynamic Connector / Office Add-In), users may experience one or more of the following symptoms in Microsoft Word, Excel, and/or PowerPoint:

· The “SAP PLM” ribbon/tab is missing (no PLM menu entry appears).

· The add-in is still listed in Office as installed and active, and is not shown as “disabled” or “slow”.

· When opening an Office document from SAP ECTR, the operation may time out with messages similar to: “E09806 – no answer from application XLS – aborting…” (or equivalent for Word/PowerPoint).

· The issue may:

• occur suddenly on previously working clients,
• affect only some clients in a tenant initially (later potentially more),
• appear after an automatic Microsoft 365 Apps update (channel-dependent),
• resolve temporarily and then recur (for example after subsequent Office launches/updates).

Affected Products / Components

· Affected: SAP ECTR 5.1.x / 5.2.x / SAP ECTR S/4 1.1.x (COM-based Office integration / classic Office Add-In generation).

· Not in scope (based on current reports): Issues where a minimal ribbon appears with only a subset of commands (that is typically a different root cause).

· Note: Some customers report that a newer integration generation SAP ECTR S/4 1.2.x / 1.3.x are not affected; however, this is not guaranteed.

Frequency / Scope

Based on customer reports and internal analysis:

· The problem can affect both 32-bit and 64-bit Office installations.

· It can occur across multiple Microsoft 365 update builds and channels. Reported builds include (examples, non-exhaustive): 18324.20194 (working in some cases) vs. 18429.20132 (not working in some cases), and later builds in the 19xxx / 198xx range in some customer environments.

· SAP/DSC testing has not been able to reproduce the issue reliably in controlled environments, suggesting that tenant/user specific configuration or feature rollout state may be involved.

Technical Observation (What we can actually see)

On affected clients, Office appears to not call expected COM add-in callbacks that are normally used to initialize the Ribbon UI. In failing scenarios, logs indicate that OnConnection occurs, but GetCustomUI and OnStartupComplete are not invoked (or are not invoked within the same startup cycle). If Office never requests the Ribbon XML (GetCustomUI), the “SAP PLM” ribbon cannot be constructed and therefore remains invisible.

Important: This behavior is controlled by the Office host application. The add-in cannot force Office to call these events/callbacks.

Technical Observation (What we can actually see):

On affected clients, Office appears to not call expected COM add-in callbacks that are normally used to initialize the Ribbon UI. In failing scenarios, logs indicate that OnConnection occurs, but GetCustomUI and OnStartupComplete are not invoked (or are not invoked within the same startup cycle). If Office never requests the Ribbon XML (GetCustomUI), the “SAP PLM” ribbon cannot be constructed and therefore remains invisible.

Important: This behavior is controlled by the Office host application. The add-in cannot force Office to call these events/callbacks.

Impact

· Users cannot access SAP ECTR Office commands inside Office applications.

· Integrated document operations (open from ECTR, status updates, check-in/out flows) may fail due to lack of add-in availability.

· Large user populations may be affected if rollout assignments expand or if a channel update triggers wider exposure.

ECTR 5.1.x / 5.2.x / 1.1.x: with Microsoft Office Integration Addon 

KBA , PLM-ECC , SAP Engineering Control Center (SAP ECTR) , Problem