Office Store Add-ins and Centralized Deployment (oh my)

Copper Contributor

Good afternoon,

 

Recently started diving into Office Add-ins from a delivery perspective and need to confirm the following to make sure I have read and understand things correctly. Have come across a few sites that seem to have blurred the line between Microsoft Store and Office Store Add-ins (in Excel > Insert tab > Get Add-ins).

 

  1. Microsoft Store and the Office Store Add-ins are two completely different things (100% unrelated from one another). Is this correct?

  2. When utilizing the Centralized Deployment method to deliver Office Store Add-ins (Integrated Apps) to AAD users/groups it works great. However, the only way this appears to work is if the M365 Admin Center > Settings > Org settings > User owned apps and services is checked blue to Let users access the Office Store. If this is a requirement (which from testing appears to be the case), is there a way to lock down Office Store Add-in access to the users while deploying the required managed Add-ins we would like them to have? It appears to be all open or completely locked down (meaning we cannot deploy Office Store Add-ins at all). Is this correct or is there another way to approach this? When it does work we can see that the Office Store Add-ins we deploy are listed under the Office Add-ins > ADMIN MANAGED section.

  3. Lastly, everything I have read concerning Centralized Deployment indicates that we should be able to target an AAD Mac user with an Office Store Add-in and it should deploy as expected.  Are there any limitations to pushing Add-ins to Mac users?  Any tricks to accomplishing what shows to be a very simple process?

 

Thank you for any assistance or guidance you can provide.

 

Blind

1 Reply

After diving into this further I'm 100% sure that turning off store access via the M365 Admin Center > Settings > Org settings > User owned apps and services (unchecking the blue box) does NOT prevent the use and centralized Deployment of Office Add-ins based on the article below.

https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoft-365/admin/manage/manage-addins-in-the-admin-center?view=o...
"This does not prevent an administrator from using Centralized Deployment to assign an add-in from the Office Store."

When I tested this a few days ago though it disappeared from my Excel version, so the question is what are the required Office versions for both Windows and Mac to allow for Centralized Deployment to work?

My version (deployed successfully with access to store in place). Blue check box was checked.
Microsoft® Excel® for Microsoft 365 MSO (Version 2112 Build 16.0.14729.20346) 64-bit

Blind