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Isaac N.
Isaac N.

Reputation: 119

Office Web-Addin Deployment via Installer

I am developing a web add-in for Microsoft Word and wondering about distribution.

I have found that there are a few options for publishing them as detailed here.

For my company, I do not believe we use Microsoft 365 so Centralized Deployment is not an option. Sharepoint catalogs most likely could work, but have a significant limitation that commands cannot be used. This reduces the functionality available in the add-in significantly. This add-in is targeted at internal employee's only (it would load content accessible only on our network), so it seems to me that publishing to AppSource would not be accepted by Microsoft, although if they would accept it I would be happy to do so.

Ideally, I would be able to package the add-in with an installer. It looks like this could be done simply for Outlook Add-ins using the Exchange PowerShell command New-App after copying the manifest file to some location or letting it be available on a server.

Some questions:

  1. Has anyone had success distributing non-Outlook Web Add-Ins via an installer? What was the mechanism to do so?
  2. It seems to me that based on the content of the manifest file, a web add-in could be distributed for any Office Product via the Exchange PowerShell command, but I could be wrong. Has anyone had success in doing so? It's not easy for me to test.
  3. Has anyone had success getting add-ins published to App Source for add-ins that are intended for a specific company and offers no functionality outside of that?

Upvotes: 2

Views: 993

Answers (1)

Eugene Astafiev
Eugene Astafiev

Reputation: 49397

  1. There is no automatic installer Office web add-ins. The PowerShell command is specific to Exchange only and not related to Word at all.
  2. If your company is using Office365 your choice would be to Publish Office Add-ins using Centralized Deployment via the Microsoft 365 admin center. In other cases you may consider Publish task pane and content add-ins to a SharePoint app catalog.
  3. That is a bad idea. When you publish your add-in to the store (App Source), the web app can be consumed by others. Otherwise, you may get a lot of negative feedback which is not really what you'd expect.

Upvotes: 0

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