At last year’s Ignite 2021 Microsoft announced the Preview of a new Teams SDK that enables developers to create Microsoft Teams apps that, with minor adjustments to the app’s manifest, can also extend Teams personal apps and message extensions to other parts of Microsoft 365, like Office and Outlook. Today, we are making the first group of these Teams apps available in Preview for Outlook and Office.com for users enrolled in the Targeted Release program. We’ve also worked on enhancing some of our own apps, like Power BI, partnered very closely with ISVs like Mural and Zoho to build apps using this SDK and will be adding more. Read on to learn how you, an admin, can get your users ready, and what admin controls are already available.
With this enhancement, apps built for Teams not only run everywhere Teams runs, but also in more of the places that users spend their time in Microsoft 365, like Outlook and Office.com. You should note that once your users in Targeted Release start seeing these apps, you will need to know how to manage this experience. Click here to learn more.
What does this mean for your organization?
With the enhanced Teams apps, your users in Targeted Release that use the apps in Teams will start seeing those apps in Outlook and Office.com.
App Management Tools
With the enhanced Teams apps, as an admin, you can now manage the app and user access to the app in a unified manner. Previously, for an app to work in Teams, Outlook, and Office, you needed to manage each app independently. With the enhanced Teams apps, you now need to manage it only once, and enable a single, connected experience for end-users across Teams, Outlook, and Office.com.
With the enhanced Teams app, for its use in Outlook and Office.com, there is no change in existing permissions, or the app data access. The enhanced app continues to use the existing permissions granted in Teams.
As an admin, you can manage the enhanced Teams apps, in the Teams admin center, using the same admin controls that you use for your Teams apps. As a Teams administrator, you can manage your end-users’ access to the enhanced Teams apps. If you are already using the Teams app that is enhanced to work across Microsoft 365, you can see the experience in Preview for Outlook and in Office.com.
After you install, your end-users can start using the Teams app in Office.com and can see the app conveniently available in the app bar in Office.com.
Like in Office.com, your end users will have a similar experience in Outlook, plus message extensions within email and calendar composite experience. The app is conveniently available on the left app bar in Outlook.
For additional guidance on how to manage access to the Teams apps across Microsoft 365, check out this Microsoft Docs article: Manage access to Teams apps across Microsoft 365.
In the future, we will bring more admin controls to the Microsoft 365 admin center to manage these experiences across all Microsoft 365 apps.
Note: The Preview roll-out of these new capabilities has started for users enrolled in the Microsoft 365 Targeted Release program or who are members of the Office Insiders program and have Outlook for Windows installed from the Beta Channel.
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