During the Ignite 2020 conference, Ales Holecek announced a series of new services to help organizations manage their Office apps from the Microsoft 365 Apps Admin center. Since then, we have started to roll out the App Health service, were you can see the overall health of your Office apps.
Today, we are excited to be releasing the next set of tools and services that will provide you with insights, automation, and control to efficiently manage your monthly Office app updates. These features include:
- Office Apps & Add-in Inventory
- Security Currency report
- Servicing Profile
To access these services, you will need to ensure that each of your Office Apps are on a Version 2007 or later. You will also be required to run through a simple onboarding process which is outlined below. Once the onboarding has been completed, the next time a user launches one of the Office Apps, the newly enhanced click-to-run service will register that device with our inventory service. From there you will start seeing all of the new features light up.
Enabling preview features
The following steps will enable your tenant to access all of the preview features within the Apps Admin center.
- Got to https://config.office.com from your favorite web browser. From there click on the Sign in button and use your Office 365 user account with either the Office Apps admin or Global admin privileges.
- After you have successfully signed in, you will find three new links on the left nav . Servicing, Settings and Inventory. Click on the inventory tab to start the preview onboarding process (you can choose to click on Settings or Servicing, but we recommend you start with the Inventory tab). From here you will be presented with a preview screen. Click on Enable preview features.
- Read the preview agreement and click “Accept” to proceed
- Once accepted, our services will initiate a provisioning process and can take up to10 min to complete.
You have now enrolled your tenant into the preview. Next time your users launch an Office App with Version 2007 and higher, you will start to see rich information within your inventory.
For more information
For more information view our documentation at https://docs.microsoft.com/deployoffice/admincenter and check out the video and demos at https://aka.ms/IgniteAACDemo
We want to hear from you
We would love to hear from you about how these features are helping by posting your thoughts in this forum. For new feature requests please visit our UserVoice site at https://ODInsiders.uservoice.com
Until next time, keep on Deploying!
Amesh Mansukhani
Program Manager
Office engineering
and learn about best practices directly from the product teams.