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How to work around iManage limitation in Excel VSTO addin

We have developed a VSTO addin for Excel, which pulls excel sheets from a web server, and allows users to manipulate the data on the sheet. It works with a local copy of the file but we don't really care about that copy. But some of our clients have "iManage Integration for Office" installed as well, and these clients experience odd behaviour. In this environment we are not able to cancel the Close event.
More specifically, if a user opens one of our files and makes changes, then closes the file, our event handler fires and prompts them to save changes (to the data on the server). If they choose Cancel, or if they choose Save and the save fails for some reason, we set Cancel = true in an attempt to keep the file open. Ordinarily this works perfectly.
For those clients with iManage, the file closes anyway. If our code has saved the local copy of the file, then the file just closes. If the local copy has not been saved, the user gets another prompt after our prompt, from iManage, asking if they want to save the file. From here, the user could click Cancel and the file remains open. But the users are reporting that it's confusing to see the second prompt after clicking Cancel on the first. And they are not willing to disable the iManage addin. We would like to be able to keep the file open in this case, preferably without seeing the iManage prompt.
Working in a test environment a client set up for me (Excel 2010), I have tried a few things:
I tried setting Cancel on the workbook level BeforeClose and the applicationlevel WorkbookBeforeClose; neither one worked (file still closes whenever iManage is enabled)
I tried to make sure my handler for WorkbookBeforeClose is registered last, by registering it in the workbook level event handler; no change
I can use the iManage ribbon to manually switch to Local Mode, which makes everything work, but I don't know whether/how I can make that change through code.
I can find the iManage addin in Globals.ThisAddIn.Application.COMAddIns; I tried setting its Connect = false, but this gives an error to the effect that only an administrator can connect/disconnect the addin.
I can save the local file during the Closing event, then do SaveAs to create a second copy; the second copy is now active and iManage closes it; then I reopen the original local file. It looks pretty good to the user, but then I have a bunch of COM references to cells on the old file, and these are all garbage. I can probably loop through and serialize them and recreate them with the new file, but it will be time consuming to code and to run, so I'm looking for other ideas first.
Is there any way I can keep the file open, without making the users do anything extra?
UPDATE
Using iManage 9.3.0.0 and Excel 2010, I created a VBA macro with a reference to Worksite Integration Interfaces Library(Ex). The event fires, but the file still closes. If I don't set the Saved property, and I type on the grid, I always get a prompt from iManage asking if I want to save.
Private WithEvents oWS As iManageExtensibility
Private Sub oWS_DocumentBeforeClose2(ByVal Doc As Variant, IgnoreIManageClose As Boolean, Cancel As Boolean)
IgnoreIManageClose = True
Cancel = True
End Sub
Private Sub Workbook_BeforeClose(Cancel As Boolean)
Set oWS = Application.COMAddIns("WorkSiteOffice2007Addins.Connect").Object
Cancel = True
ActiveWorkbook.Saved = True
End Sub

You do not need to disable the iManage integration add-in for Office. Your application should detect the presence of the iManage integration add-in and then handle that add-in's own equivalent Close event
To do that, first get an instance of the iManage add-in by examining the Excel Application.COMAddins collection and fetching back the COM add-in instance with a ProgID of either WorkSiteOffice2003Addins.Connect (Excel 2003 or earlier) or WorkSiteOffice2007Addins.Connect (Excel 2007 or later).
Actually there should also be a so-called "backwards compatibility" add-in installed also registered with a ProgID of oUR02k.Connect which you may reference instead. Again, whether that is installed or not depends somewhat on the version of FileSite/DeskSite that is installed on the machine.
That all may seem confusing to you however it's because the add-ins have changed over the years, so it rather depends on how old the iManage client is (i.e. FileSite, DeskSite) as well as the version of Office you're targeting. You may need to compensate for different Excel/iManage client versions in your code
Once you have the right COM add-in reference, examine the COMAddin.Object property. This value represents an instance of the iManage Office integration add-in
From there you can cast that object to the strongly typed COM interface of iManageExtensibility
You're then able to hook into all the Office application events that iManage have hijacked (much like you have done in your application) and respond to those events rather than the native Excel ones.
In your case you will need to monitor the DocumentBeforeClose2 event. Note the character '2' at the end. There is also a legacy event named DocumentBeforeClose but the newer DocumentBeforeClose2 has the following method signature:
DocumentBeforeClose2(object doc, ref bool ignoreimanageclose, ref bool cancel)
Finally, in your DocumentBeforeClose2 event handler add your business logic for cancelling the close event and/or the iManage close event. You do that by setting the ignoreimanageclose and/or cancel Booleans to true/false as appropriate. The doc parameter in this case will be the Excel workbook instance, so you may safely cast it to the Excel.Workbook interface if you wish
PS: if you are developing against the iManage APIs and require support you should consider purchasing the iManage SDK. That SDK contains help on various APIs, code samples, and crucially I believe it gives you access to some dev support.

Opening a workbook (or other Office doc) on a shared drive that another user has open

Suppose a workbook exists on a shared network drive, and is open by User A. If User B attempts to open this file by double clicking it, he gets something like the following prompt:
If User B instead attempts to open the workbook programmatically (perhaps with an add-in) using:
Workbooks.Open("N:\path_to_workbook\workbook.xlsx")
what happens, exactly? Does this above prompt appear? If so, can it be suppressed with Application.DisplayAlerts = False? If Workbooks.Open as shown above throws an exception in this case, do we need to try again using the ReadOnly argument, as:
Workbooks.Open("N:\path_to_workbook\workbook.xlsx", ReadOnly:=True)
I have read other posts (including this one) that suggest that Workbooks.Open in the first code snippet succeeds and the workbook is opened read-only, although this is not perfectly clear.
Unfortunately, I don't have a test environment configured to replicate this scenario myself, which would otherwise be the obvious answer.

I tested on our network drive environment, and found the following. If the file is opened by User A and User B attempts to open the file programmatically using Workbooks.Open then the result will be a Read Only version of the file.
If you wish to control the opening of Read Only files than you may utilize the following code example to close it:
Sub Test()
Dim wb As Workbook
Set wb = Workbooks.Open("Path_To_Excel_File")
If wb.ReadOnly Then
MsgBox "File already in use"
wb.Close savechanges:=False
End If
End Sub

Backward compatibility using excel interop in C#

I am using an excel interop to open an excel file, edit and save it with some other name in some other location. For that I have used:
workbook.saveAs(newFileName)
But it is prompting in the application for compatibility like how it is used to prompt while saving .xls file in office 2007. I have to click on continue in the front end application in order to continue. How can it be resolved?
Thanks in advance,
Sarath

There is an Application.DisplayAlerts property which you can set to False during your SaveAs operation (and then set back to True).
Here are the details: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/microsoft.office.interop.excel._application.displayalerts(v=office.11).aspx

... I'm not sure I 100% understand what it is you're experiencing, but if it's a notification box that appears, try putting this line before the Save command:
ExcelApp.DisplayAlerts = False
That should disable the alert from popping up....

Better option for hosting MS Office documents in custom app?

I am currently hosting an IE Browser control in a .NET (2.0) Form and using it to load Office files such as Excel and Word thusly:
_ieCtrl.Navigate("C:\\test.xls", False);
The hosting and loading works well except whenever I navigate to a file I am presented with a dialog that asks whether I want to save or open the file. (This is standard IE file-download behavior.) I always want to open it of course and I do not want the dialog to show.
Another issue is that when I close the window that hosts the IE control and the Office doc the document does not close and remains open on disk. This means that subsequent attempts to open the same file via my app or the native office app will fail because of the sharing violation.
Is there a programmatic way of avoiding this dialog and cleaning up resources afterward? I am asking for a programmatic answer because web research has only yielded solutions that entail modifying OS-level settings.
Bounty NOTE:
I am open to any solution to this issue that will allow me to:
Host an Excel spreadsheet inside my application
Work rather transparently (avoid usability issues like the one described above)
Avoid having to make any OS-specific changes that may affect other applications (especially icluding IE)
Is zero additional cost (no licensed 3rd party libs please) Code Project and other open source resources are OK
Not mess around with the DSO Framer ActiveX control, unless a stable version is developed/discovered

Is your intention for the user to be able to work with the Excel file in an Excel-ish way (i.e. columns, rows, formulas, etc.), possibly saving it back? If this is the case, I can't see how you can solve this problem well without relying on COM Interop with the Excel object model or by integrating third-party libraries to work with the Excel sheet. I know you said no paid solutions, but there are some feature-rich 3rd-party controls out there just for working with Excel files within applications.
I noticed in your comment to SLaks that the final product is a "dashboard of sorts". If your intention is to design a a custom dashboard application, have you considered parsing the Excel file(s) to extract the data and then presenting it in a logical manner within your application. This removes the need to directly display and work with the Excel file while still allowing you to work with the data inside that file. If you are trying to get the data outside of the file, here are two approaches among many:
You might consider using the Excel object model and COM interop to read the data from the Excel file into your application. Granted, this includes a dependency on Excel being installed, but it is a possibility. This article has some great code for getting started with reading Excel files in this way.
A better way might be to use a library that doesn't have a dependency on Excel being installed on the local system. This answer suggests using the Excel Data Reader library, available on CodePlex.
I know this answer side-steps your original answer of "hosting MS Office documents in [a] custom app," but in case what you're really interested in is the data inside those Excel files, hopefully this answer will prove helpful.

This is a horrible hack and should only be considered as a last resort: SendKeys.Send("{O}");
http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/system.windows.forms.sendkeys%28VS.71%29.aspx
Something similar to
_ieCtrl.Navigate("C:\\test.xls", False);
(code to sleep or wait may be needed here)
SendKeys.Send("{O}");
Basically, you send the "o" key to the dialog so it presses the "open" option. You are simulating a keyboard presses to click the "open" button. It is hackey because
1) you may need to wait in between
calls. If you send the o key before
the dialog is up it will be missed.
Hopefully the navigate call is finished when the dialog pops (dont know behavior of control in c#). You may need to experiment with the time since different computers will open faster\slower
2) If the dialog is not shown on a
computer, you will be inserting "o"s
into it. This may cause problems when
exiting because it may popup another dialog to try and save
the changes. May be able to prevent this by opening it in read-only mode
3) Different versions or windows may need different sendkeys commands. For example, you may need to send "o" and them the "{enter}" key
4) Probably more :)

If you want to open the file in a separate Excel instance (not embedded in the WebBrowser control), you can simply call
Process.Start(#"C:\Test.xls");

Office was never meant to run in embedded mode, not in a web page or in an ActiveX Document host. Microsoft had time and time again given us the warning. From pulling dsoframer from the knowledge base to skipping the BrowserFlags registry key in Office 2007.
Move to Office add-ins, Excel Web Access or Office Web Apps as quickly as you can.

Closing workbook in Excel programmatically

Lets say I have an Excel file named "DataSheet.xls" open. How can I kill that Excel file using c#?

using Excel = Microsoft.Office.Interop.Excel;
(...)
var app = (Excel.Application)System.Runtime.InteropServices.Marshal.GetActiveObject("Excel.Application");
// I have english excel, but another culture and need to use english culture to use excel calls...
Thread.CurrentThread.CurrentCulture = CultureInfo.GetCultureInfo("en-US");
app.Workbooks["DataSheet"].Close(false, false, false);

It's very likely that a single process will contain multiple open workbooks. Especially because Excel prefers to re-use an existing instance when opening files from Explorer, Outlook, etc. instead of creating a new process for each workbook.
Not to mention killing the process will require you to either 1) close the main window which will prompt if there's unsaved changes or 2) forcefully kill the process which will likely cause Excel to show its crash recovery options the next time you launch it.
The best course of action is to use the Excel COM API to close the workbooks. You can use the Marshal.GetActiveObject method to get a running instance of Excel and then refer to the Office developer reference for more information about how to close specific named workbooks without prompting.

The Process class would allow you to kill a process. You could inspect all running excel.exe processes, get the main window handle for the process, check whether the caption of that window contains the name of the XLS file and then kill the process for that window.
Otherwise you could use the Office COM classes to talk to Excel. This may also allow you to shut down open workbooks.

off hand don't have the code as such. but generally, in the past i'd have used a couple of api calls to do this. first, you'd get the window handle (hWnd) and then you'd use the sendmessage api call with the wm_close parameter.
that's about all i can remember -it's been about 10 yrs since i had to do that kinda stuff, so the field may have changed since then :)