Microsoft Teams brings together the vision of collaboration and productivity into a single experience. Through our partner ecosystem customers can benefit from a plethora of applications to further customize and accelerate their results. Today, Government Community Cloud (GCC) customers can benefit from those applications, across different categories. From project management to DevOps or social to education apps in Teams enable you to get more from our hub for teamwork. We will be gradually rolling out this capability in the next few weeks.
Based on customer feedback, we have brought a set of new features to the Government Community Cloud that allow end-users and IT admins to successfully manage and use third-party apps:
- Compliant Microsoft apps are enabled to users by default. For example, at the time of writing this blog post, Yammer is not compliant in GCC and thus will NOT appear in the list of Allowed Microsoft Apps. The definition of a non-compliant Microsoft app is Microsoft owned apps that do not comply with our GCC offering obligations.
- Third-party apps like Smartsheet, ServiceNow etc. are available to IT Admins in the Admin Portal with controls to enable these apps to be used in Teams
- User-level permission policy, giving admins the ability to assign policies to selectively enable/disable apps per user
- App setup policy, giving admins the ability to tailor the Teams client experience by pre-pinning apps to the app bar
We want to ensure that our app experience in GCC gives admins complete control over their environment, so we've set the following defaults:
1. At the tenant level, third-party apps are turned-off and all third-party apps are added to the blocked list of apps.
2. The default global user-level permission policy also blocks all third-party apps by default
3. Compliant Microsoft apps are made available by default to users in GCC
Reviewing Third-party apps BEFORE enabling
Since third-party apps are not controlled by Microsoft, we have blocked them out-of-box. Make sure as you are reviewing apps in their respective categories at admin.teams.microsoft.com -> Teams Apps -> Permission Policies that you not the additional information as shown below:
(App permission policies control what apps you want to make available to Teams users in your organization. You can use the Global (Org-wide) default policy and customize it, or you can create one or more policies to meet the needs of your organization. Learn more
"Third party apps in Microsoft Teams aren’t under the control of or owned by Microsoft and aren’t governed by the Microsoft Online Subscription Agreement. Your organization’s use of each third party app is subject to that app’s terms and conditions and privacy statement. When you enable Allow third party apps in Microsoft Teams, you acknowledge that you are responsible to review each app’s terms to determine whether they meet the needs of you organization. Learn more) "
We encourage administrators to assess and ensure that apps they intend to enable fall within their organizational policies, which may require vetting with internal/external stakeholders. Here is a link authored by @trenthazy that captures in detail the steps needed to enable apps in your environment .
We look forward to seeing our Government Community Cloud customers be more productive with apps in Teams. Please share your feedback and ask questions below.