Scale your Office solutions across customer organizations with Office 365 Centralized Deployment

Office Add-ins team

May 30th, 2017 0

Late last year we announced the Centralized Deployment service in preview, that allows administrators to deploy Office add-ins and today we are excited to announce general availability of Centralized Deployment.

Office add-ins help Office users to personalize their work experience and streamline data access. For developers building Office add-ins, there have been multiple options to make those add-ins available to users but until now, none have automatically deployed add-ins with minimal interaction.

Now, using the Centralized Deployment service, IT administrators can deploy Office web add-ins to individual users, groups or an organization, directly from the Office 365 Admin Center or using PowerShell scripts.

Users can simply open their Office applications such as Word, Excel or PowerPoint on Windows, Mac or Office Online and they will automatically see the add-in installed on their ribbon. This allows organizations large and small to easily extend Office with high-value services across all platforms.

Upload add-ins with Centralized Deployment in Office 365 Admin Center

The good news is that as a developer you need not make any changes to your Office add-ins to use Centralized Deployment. As long as you are using the same great functionality such as Add-in Commands, your users will continue to have the best experience with their deployments.

Centralized Deployment offers the following functionality:

Windows, Mac and Office Online support for Word, Excel and PowerPoint
- The Add-Ins are automatically deployed on client boot
Store Add-Ins or Line of Business Add-Ins
- Add-Ins can either be acquired and assigned to users from the Office Store or a manifest can be uploaded for Line Of Business applications
Office Admin Center or PowerShell
- Use either Office 365 Admin Center or Powershell to deploy, assign and modify Add-Ins
Eligibility documentation and Compatibility script
- Documentation has been provided to help organizations determine if centralized deployment will work as expected
- An Administrator can run a script to determine if their organization has the correct configuration to use Centralized Deployment
ISV analytics
- Via Seller Dashboard we will soon display analytics of how many users have been assigned an Add-In per tenant ID. This can be tied into licensing recommendations for upsell, for more information see here

Several Office 365 customers are already using Centralized Deployment today. See how Genetec Inc., solved their organizations needs with the Qorus Office 365 add-ins, using Centralized Deployment.

Access the Centralized Deployment feature from Office 365 Admin Center

Log into your Office 365 account. On the Office 365 portal, from the app launcher, select the Admin tile from the list of web apps and services.
Once you are in the admin portal, select from the left navigation, Settings -> Services & add-ins, from the drop-down menu.
In the Services & add-ins page, select Upload add-in, to launch the Centralized Deployment dialog and follow instructions to upload your add-ins.