Hello,
Our office uses Windows 7 Enterprise 64-bit, with a combination of Office 2010/2013 64 bit, and Bluebeam Revu x64 CAD as our main PDF editor.
We're trying to look for a way to globally disabled the Bluebeam Add-Ins so that they do not load at startup inside Word, Excel, and Outlook. For those of you who use Bluebeam, you probably know that it has a "Bluebeam Administrator" component
that has a "Plug-ins" tab and allows you to check/uncheck the Microsoft Office & Microsoft Outlook Bluebeam plugins. This option does seem to work as intended - in Word for example - it does add/remove the Bluebeam tab on the ribbon. However,
we've noticed that even with the Bluebeam plugin disabled, if you go to File > Options > Add-ins, and choose COM Add-ins, you'll still see the Bluebeam add-in option there, with the box checked, and the Load Behavior: "Load at startup".
So it appears to us, that is is not TRULY disabled. The other piece of the pie is that changing it via the Bluebeam Administrator, or via the command prompt, appears to be profile specific. If I was to login as another user, I would have to do this
process again. I'm sure you can quickly appreciate how tedious this becomes in a large enterprise environment. The only way we've been able to consistently get rid of it, is to run Word/Excel/Powerpoint as an administrator, and then go into the
COM add-ins, highlight the Bluebeam add-in, and click "Remove".
So I have two questions:
1. Can anyone confirm that when a plugin still shows as "checked on" inside the COM add-ins section of Word, that it IS still loading, even though it otherwise appears to be disabled?
2. Does anyone know a good way to truly remove the Bluebeam add-in in Word/Excel/Outlook for all computers and users - via login script or group policy, etc.?
I've been going back and forth with Bluebeam tech support about this and they keep asking me to "make sure you have administrator rights", and "make sure you're running the command prompt as an administrator" (when enabling/disabling the addins via command prompt). I am in the Domain Admins group, and Domain Admins have local admin rights on all our machines, so I don't believe this to be an "admin rights" issue. I can even see the registry key changing (HKLM > Software > Microsoft > Office > Word > Addins), but none of these options ever get rid of the actual COM Add-In inside of the Office programs without us manually removing it. They also told me at one point that this is by design and even though the COM Add-In shows up, it's still "not loaded".
Any ideas?