Updates to Office.com and the Office 365 app launcher

[Scott Schnoll]

Office.com is the URL for an experience that we’ve been building for a couple of years. We designed it to be your work hub experience and help you quickly get to the apps, tools, documents, and content you use on a daily basis. We’ve also brought intelligence into the experience that customizes the experience based on your activities.

Figure 1 - Office.com home page

Office.com includes the Office 365 app launcher, which opens when you click the app launcher icon . The app launcher, which in addition to Office.com is also available across the suite, is a menu of your Office 365 apps and services that makes opening and switching between apps easy.

Figure 2 - Office 365 app launcher

We’re rolling out some changes to the way pinned applications work on Office.com and in the app launcher:

1. We’ve provided admin controls in the Azure Active Directory portal that enable admins with the Cloud application administrator, Application administrator or Global administrator role to pin up to three apps to Office.com and the app launcher. Any app added by an admin can be unpinned by the user at any time. Office.com and the app launcher are now one experience and will show the same set of apps.
2. There’s no need to manually pin apps to the app launcher because the system now automatically pins apps for you based on usage. Any app added automatically can be unpinned at any time.
3. In the previous experience, apps were removed after they were unused for a certain period of time. In the updated experience, apps will remain until manually unpinned.

Figure 3 - Office 365 gallery

We’re also rolling out a change that provides admins through the Azure Active Directory portal with the ability to group apps and customize the view of the Office 365 gallery. The Office 365 gallery enables you to explore and learn about available applications. This customization can be done via the “collections” blade in the Azure Active Directory admin portal. For information on how to do this, see Create collections on the My Apps portal.

Customers will see these changes rolled out soon. We welcome your comments and feedback so be sure to let us know what you think of these changes.

--The Office.com and app launcher team

[Jonas Back]

@Scott Schnoll Great news? Will you be able as an admin to pin a custom URL (which is not an Azure AD Application)? For example an URL pointing to a 3rd party Intranet site or such?

[Patrick Nehm]

@Jonas Back I solved this by adding the external website, SharePoint Sites, ... as applications in Azure AD. Simply add a new application, select your users (or the group All Users) an under Single Sign-On select Link an add the URL to your site.

[Scott Schnoll]

Hi @Jonas Back and @Patrick Nehm,

Great question, Jonas, and spot on answer, Patrick!  That is exactly the way in which you would want to add a custom URL.  We'll see about getting a blog post out for this scenario.  :)

Hope this helps!

[WB2019]

What's the reasoning behind taking control from users over their pinned apps? Automatically adding apps they frequently use is great, but that's not necessarily the criteria that makes someone want to pin an app.

[Jenny Bruce]

Agree with @WB2019 - I actually want to pin apps I use less frequently, because the ones I use regularly are actually pretty easy to  find without being in the O365 app launcher. For example, what's the point of having Excel, Word and PowerPoint pinned - I'm in and out of these types of documents all day, and if I'm in my OneDrive and want to make a new Word document I go New +Word document.  On the other hand, I might need to use one of my organisation's apps that we've included in the app catalogue once in a blue moon.  I don't want to have to mess around scrolling through the list of apps to find it - I want to pin my preferred apps so that they are there when I want them.  

Please reinstate the ability for users to self-select which apps they have pinned in the launcher.

Further, it would be good if 'Admin selected apps' - the organisations own apps - were available from the Office 365 All apps page.  At the moment these are only visible in the app launcher.