Microsoft 365 Community Office Add-ins, 8 Aug 2023

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From YouTube: Office Add-ins community call – July 2023

Description

This month: Go over the Top 5 AppSource Validation Errors (March 2023 – May 2023) - Elizabeth Samuel, Senior Technical Writer (Microsoft). The presenter focuses on causes and how to avoid top AppSource validation errors affecting Office Add-ins’ submissions and she highlights supporting AppSource policies. General Q&A.

The call was hosted by Preethika Kiruveedula (Microsoft).

Recorded on July 12, 2023.

A

A

I'm gonna go ahead and get started this morning. uh Welcome to the office items, Community call for July everyone. Thank you for attending uh good morning or good evening, based off your current time zone. My name is prithika karaby Doula I'm, a product manager at Microsoft and I will be hosting today's call on our agenda, for today's call we'll we will be going over the top five appsource validation errors from the period of March to May of 2023, and our presenter for today is Elizabeth Samuel, who is a senior technical writer at Microsoft.

A

uh Elizabeth, did you want to take over.

B

I will thank you good day to everyone good night.

B

Okay, all right, so today we will be going over these appsource validation errors. From this time period we actually sent out a blog post in June, and that's basically, what we'll be going over the content of that. So these top five eras were that the additional service or account was not disclosed.

B

um We had some confusing first run experiences um missing links for sign in sign out or sign up. It could be that it's just one of them is missing. um You would need testing instructions that the um the validators can just go through without having to come back to you or the provider. Name in the Manifest is not close enough to the publisher, namely in the listing to make it clear that these are the same companies or entities all right so more details additional service will account not this closed.

B

um So one of the things you need to ask yourself is: if you're adding requires additional services or accounts. If that's the case, you need to let your users know- and you do so by including that information in the description, so it shows up for the add-in. Is there a dependency that needs a payment? You also need to indicate that in the setup, so you that way in the um add-in description again on appsource when it shows up people will know. Oh, this may need an additional payment or some form of paying okay.

B

So next up about the confusing first run experience you need to find out. If your add-in has a clear value proposition and a seamless first run experience um from the start screen, it should be pretty clear what the add-in is supposed to do for the customer.

B

um What are the benefits and it doesn't have to be- you know a book. It could just be a few lines. Just a few statements on the start screen. Do they need to sign in or sign up to use the add-in, what's the benefit to them of that additional account or service.

B

However, if you're adding targets, larger organizations or Enterprises, you can indicate this on the notes of certification later on I'll talk a little more about what targeting Enterprises means and what you, how you can indicate this in the notes. uh So, but in this case, if you do not provide a first run experience because it's this type of add-in, then on your UI in your Adam's UI, you should include a link or an email so that users can find out more about your services, since you won't really explain it in the first time.

B

Okay, missing links for for sign in sign out and sign up again. If your add-in depends on external accounts or Services, you need to make very clear sign in sign out or sign up experiences actually all of them.

B

um The only thing is: if you have an add-in that targets Enterprises or large organizations, then you again indicate that this isn't adding their targets Enterprises and you do need to provide a sign up experience in that case.

B

Okay, so, as I mentioned, Enterprise only um two there's a whole bunch of things that you actually Exempted from. If this is an ad in that targets, Enterprises, what's not required, assign an experience for external accounts and services, especially if they're, using something like single sign-on.

B

um It's not managed by your add-in or anything like that. They can sign in otherwise or it's managed by the company, um then in that case you don't need to provide this, um the seamless personal experience and the value proposition, because in that case you need to provide some information so that the person can contact you if they're interested in learning more about what your admin provides in the notes of certification.

B

uh You can say something like this: the add-in isn't providing a sign up link because it's targeting Enterprise- and this is a policy that refers to so you can totally do that or something similar. So if it's not providing a sign in experience, then you could say some version of that text in your description.

B

Okay, testing instructions. This is really important, because if this is unclear or not, adequate information is provided. This can come back to you needing um further instructions or more information, so as far as possible. If you can provide as much of this as as um make sense for what your add-in does, what are the usual scenarios?

B

What what does somebody need to do in order to go through all the scenarios in your add-in? So you need to provide the instructions you need to provide any product keys credentials accounts. Anything like that. You provide those samples in the notes for certification. If you have more complex scenarios, that is not really obvious.

B

If you try to talk it through, then you can also provide screenshots or if you want to make sure that these instructions are available to subsequent submissions, then you may want to use the additional certification section and upload a PDF with the screenshots that illustrate the steps with any instructions that you want persisted. So these are options that you have for providing testing information last but not least provide a name and the publisher name.

B

So what you need to check is the Manifest that you uploaded to partner Center the provider name element in that manifest consider what that is. What did you set it to be? Please don't have it be contoso or Northwind or any of the fictitious ones that we provide by you know in default, make sure you've updated it to your own company name or whatever.

B

You call your entity, then consider what the name of your publisher, um the publisher, ID, what names associated with that in your partner Center account, and while they do not have to be the exact same thing like I'm gonna use contoso song contoso, but um you need to make sure that they match up, and it's clear that, for example, let's say in my add-in I say this is something from Microsoft and then the other thing says: Microsoft Corporation,.

B

Same company, so that's what we're looking for. They can't be contoso and Northwind they're, not the same in any way, and it's not obvious that they are connected. So that's the kind of thing we're looking for that to make it really clear that these two things are from the same source.

B

All right- and here are some resources that you can use. These are the main policies, some policies other than these May apply, depending on the situation which you're adding in particular. um This is all of the policies. Marketplace, certification policies, um office store, apps checklist, so we have a couple of checklists and step-by-step guides so that you're ready to publish and submit successfully, and as I mentioned, this is based on a blog post that we put together um using the information from March to me and we publish this in June all right.

B

So that's it for me. Thank you.

A

Great thanks, Elizabeth.

B

You're welcome.

A

All right, I will now be going into the Q. A section portion of this call so starting out our first question was: we are just starting to build our first word add-in a writing assistance tool, but already have requests for Outlook and PowerPoint. We saw that for Outlook a new desktop client will be released next year. As such, we are wondering about the roadmap and aligning apis potentially so that I, ideally for what we are trying to do. A single API would support all Office 365 applications.

A

The answer to this is Office. 365 provides apis which can be application specific or common across multiple applications. Please find more details at the link that is provided here. Any API which is built for existing Outlook clients would be available for new outlook as well, and there will be no additional work needed.

A

Our second question of the day is what is the status of pinning admin deployed add-ins to Outlook web, as was discussed in the office add-ins Community call in March of 2021. We need deployed add-ins to be immediately visible to users and not hidden, requiring digging to find the answer to this is we still currently do not support pending of admin deployed add-ins to Outlook web, but we acknowledge the request. We would get back on timelines with this one soon.

A

This question is: do we have any API to extract a PowerPoint, selected, slides alone uh for this question? We need more context here, for example, what exactly do you mean by extract? We do have apis to get selected slides of a presentation that could be found at this link here, but in regards to what exact functionality you're trying to implement. It would be great if you could either add another question into next month's Community call questions or if you could provide more information at a GitHub feature, request, link.

A

For this question it is, we are currently developing a text- enhancement add-in for word, with the objective of offering it without any online account requirements. Our aim is to ensure that the add-in operates locally, thereby eliminating any concerns for professional and administrative users about their data being uploaded to an external server.

A

um However, in order to implement the add-in, we need to store some configuration information locally. This information should be independent of the document that the user is working on. We have explored the settings in custom XML part apis, but unfortunately they only save settings in the current document, which is not an optimal solution. Hence we are inquiring about suggestions on how to store these settings.

A

Our answer to this is: you should try the runtime API 1.1 office, runtime storage interface. This is a Microsoft learn site that you can get started from. It is a asynchronous global and persistent key value. Storage.

A

um For this particular question regarding a developing a spell checker, add-in I will not be going to saying the entire question, and this call because we are wondering if we could get more information from this partner. In other words, we can get your contacts, so we can continue having messaging more frequently. So we can understand your requests in more detail.

A

For this question regarding message encryption, what is the status? Are you talking here about? Smime also, is this to be supported on mobile form factor, we plan to add support for message encryption as a part of our initiative to close the gaps for calm scenarios later this year. You can refer to the apis. You replace body on read, which is already available for preview. At this learn Microsoft link. We don't have timelines for mobile support, yet.

A

This question is: will there be any support for mail sent, slash receive events, we don't have support for mail sent slash receive events yet, however, you can use the on message send to see if an email is being sent um at this link that goes into the details and how you can get started on doing that.

A

This question is: is new outlook now the equivalent of the previously planned one Outlook? Yes, new outlook mentioned as one Outlook in previous calls, is an initiative to bring a new modern, simplified design to your Outlook app.

A

For this particular question, we have a vsto add-in deployed to 2000 plus users. Now we have built on officejs.based out in how to remove existing vsto add-ins. After deploying this new officejs add-in, is there any standard way, um there's no particular standard way, but here's a good starting point. You should try it's how to manage add-ins in the admin Center for deployed admin specifically, um so hopefully, this link will be able to give you a good direction.

A

Lastly, the question is: will the item send about an Outlook continue to be supported, we're considering moving to the on message done and on appointments and events that have been put off by the fact that the dialog is not customizable after the user clicks the send button thinking the email is complete. We display custom dialogue with the purpose of promoting the user to recheck the email again to remind them if they have forgotten anything. We're still investigating this answer, we'll get back to you on timeline.

A

Soon um it'll either be in enter the next month's Community call or in the subsequent blog post.

A

All right, so that was all for our q a today and all for our presentations, but once again as if you're new to office add-ins here are some quick links on how you can learn more about office add-ins in general and the community call. This is a link to our documentation. A couple quick starts for all the different hosts Outlook Excel word: PowerPoint how to get started with script, lab the samples that we support.

A

You could always join the Microsoft 365 developer program if you'd like to be more involved and also a link to The Office script stocks.

A

If you'd like to engage with our team for technical questions about office, add-ins feel free to go to this aka.ms link here, where it's office, add-ins, Dev questions and post any uh questions you have there or also update it on stock overflow. We also monitor that pretty regularly and for product bugs feel free to go to this GitHub page right here and go to the officejs repository and submit an issue. It'll then be triaged by someone on our team and we'll try to get an answer for you for feature, requests and ideas.

A

We have the M365 Dev suggestions. So if there's um something you'd like to see in our products for office, add-ins feel free to submit a feature request or an idea on how we can always improve um at this link, and you can always send a quick smile or frown at inside office. Just to give us a broader view of how you feel.

A

And for regarding our other developer, Community calls that we have for Microsoft 365.. We have the platform, call the Power, Platform development and Viva connection, SharePoint framework call the identity platform and, of course the add-ins Community call, and we also have a Power Platform call if you would like to learn about all the calls and assets that we have under the M365 developer. Community feel free to go to this aka.ms link here and it'll. Give you more information about all of the calls that we support all right. Thank you.

A

The recording will be soon at the office. M365 Community YouTube channel feel free to follow us on Twitter. Our next call will be August 9th at 8 A.M Pacific time at this same meeting. Invite and the agenda will be hosted here and you can always submit your questions for next month's Community call at this office. Add-Ins form thanks for joining everyone.