Approval reports and SaaS app changes for Office submissions

Office Add-ins team

As we continue to see great progress with add-in submissions and acquisitions within AppSource and our client storefronts, we also continue to evolve and improve our validation process. Today we are announcing two new features for Office app and add-in submissions via the Seller Dashboard, to help you reach customers more quickly and effectively.

Approval reports (with recommendations)

Apps and add-ins in AppSource are optimized to reach the broadest possible set of users.  Our validation policies help to ensure wide reach by requiring that apps and add-ins are easily identified and understood and provide a seamless and fluid experience for AppSource customers. To improve the validation process, we’re introducing new validation reports, including approval reports. Solutions that have a clear value proposition and a great initial user experience see an up to 50% higher acquisition rate than those that rely on brand alone. The updated validation reports identify what issues must be fixed prior to publishing (for example, functionality that is broken or not secure), and provide suggestions for improving acquisition rates (most notably around merchandizing and your add-in’s initial user experience).

Our updated reports show you whether the validation team has completed a full test pass on your submission, or whether validation was blocked.

If validation was successful, your validation report will include one of the following:

1. Approval report – Congratulations! This report indicates your submission has been approved and there are no suggestions to help you improve merchandizing or marketing.

2. Approval report with recommendations – Congratulations! This report indicates your submission has been approved and includes suggestions to improve audience reached and search result listing.  These suggestions are optional and implementing them is not required for publication.

3. Rejection report – This report will clearly mark which items are mandatory issues that must be addressed before your submission can be published and which items are recommended changes to improve your submission merchandizing and search results placement.

SaaS apps

Developers have been submitting SaaS apps (formerly Web Apps using Azure AD) via the Seller Dashboard; those apps were then validated by the Office Store team and published to AppSource.

Now, you have a new way to submit all SaaS apps for validation and publishing to AppSource: the Cloud Partner Portal. Going forward,  we will no longer support submissions of new or updated SaaS apps via the Seller Dashboard.

To publish a new app:

To sign-up to be a partner and have apps published to AppSource and other portals, fill out the nomination form. In the What type of offer do you intend to publish? field, choose App. In the What type of app do you intend to publish? field, choose SaaS App.

To edit your existing app:

SaaS apps previously published via the Seller Dashboard will be available in the Cloud Partner Portal for editing and will continue to appear on AppSource.

• Sign in to the Cloud Partner Portal at  https://cloudpartner.azure.com/ using the same account you used to sign in to the Seller Dashboard.
• When prompted, agree to the publisher agreement.
• Your apps are listed under All Offers on the Cloud Partner Portal Home page.

Office Add-ins team

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