Announcing: New Ways to Manage Teams Apps & Integrations for Your Organization
Published Mar 25 2019 09:00 AM 32.4K Views
Microsoft

We know that many of you feel overwhelmed with the abundance of workplace tools and applications available to you and your organization. To ease the burden of this overload, we created Microsoft Teams to give you a single hub for collaboration. Teams brings together all your tools, services, and content together in one place.

 

We are finding that many organizations who have begun using Microsoft Teams and have witnessed the transformational power of this hub for teamwork are also leveraging some of the 250+ available Teams integrations. We have also seen many organizations building their own integrations.

 

With that, last week we announced that we are making it easier to manage this integrated experience for your end users. This month we are beginning to roll out new and more flexible ways for you to manage how end users can discover, use, and develop these apps. Here’s a look at what’s new:

 

New capabilities to help drive adoption of specific apps & integrations

 

As an admin, you can use app setup policies to customize Microsoft Teams to highlight the apps that are most important for your users. You choose the apps to pin and set the order that they appear in the app bar. App setup policies let you showcase apps that users in your organization need, whether they were built by Microsoft, our partners, or your developers. You can also use app setup policies to manage how built-in features appear, inside of Microsoft Teams, for your organization.

 

App Setup Policies in the Microsoft Teams admin centerApp Setup Policies in the Microsoft Teams admin center

Developer Policy in App Setup PoliciesDeveloper Policy in App Setup Policies

Apps on Teams desktop app and iOS mobile appApps on Teams desktop app and iOS mobile app

 

Learn more about how you can create and assign app setup policies here.

 

Improvements to the way you manage existing app settings

 

You can now manage access to apps for individual users through App permission policy. This policy lets you control who in your organization can interact with specific apps & integrations. You can also limit access to apps built by your organization, letting you phase the app rollout.

 

In addition to user policies, you can define org-wide settings to block certain apps outright for your tenant.

 

Org-wide app settingsOrg-wide app settings

We’ve also now made it possible to control access to apps separately from the ability to develop and test custom apps within your organization, otherwise known as “side loading.” You can now assign policy over which users can upload custom apps, either to teams or for personal use. This will make it easier to enable your developers to build for Teams. Once the apps are ready, you can then publish them to the tenant app catalog and assign setup policy.

 

Automating policy assignment through PowerShell

 

Once policies are created in the Teams Admin Center, you can then bulk assign these policies to users and groups of individuals through the Microsoft Teams PowerShell cmdlets.


Microsoft Teams PowerShell

 

Getting ready for these changes

 

These policies will be rolling out in the coming weeks, starting with app setup policy. You will be able to manage these from the Teams apps section of the Microsoft Teams admin center.

 

New per-user assignment of app permission and side loading policies will be available once your organization is migrated over to the new admin center.

 

Exploring our available integrations

 

We just announced some of our latest integrations to help you work smarter, not harder. Have a look if you’re not sure where to start!

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‎Jan 26 2021 01:18 PM
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