[ms office - 2016] How do others go about managing add-ins?

[rickjames]

Morning all. I'll try and summarise this issue as best as I can

 

- User wants an add-in to be available (Refworks, in this instance) be publicly available for students to install when using Word on our managed estate. We have a managed install (MSI, for what its worth) of Office 2016 ProPlus installed on our managed PCs/laptops. Not M365 Apps for Enterprise.

 

- Access to the Office Store is blocked via the Admin Center (NOT the Microsoft Store).

 

- When a user is on one of our managed devices, the store appears to be available. However, when they install an add-in and try to run it, they get an error saying it's unable to connect to the catalogue. As far as I am aware, this is due to the Office Store being blocked, as per above, because when I temporarily unblocked it, I could install anything I pleased and it ran without issue.

 

- When a user is on their own personal device using a Microsoft 365 Apps for Enterprise install of word and try accessing the Store, they get an message saying the store is blocked. This is fine.

 

- We are aware that we can deploy specific add-ins to users via O365, but the problem with this is that it's only available to them when using M365 Apps for Enterprise; it doesn't carry over to Office 2016 ProPlus

 

 

We have been back and forth with Microsoft about this on how we can deploy add-ins for a managed environment, and their solutions were the following

 

- Install M365 Apps for Enterprise on our estate and manage everything through Centralized Deployment - Not going to happen when we have volume licensed installs of Office. It's not something I'm responsible either.

- Allow users complete access to the Office Store

- Obtain the manifest.xml file and offline installation package, and install via other means. I assume they are referring to something like SCCM, and something our Windows team would have to do. It's unlikely as it seems rather time consuming

 

 

Is anyone else aware of any other better way to do this? Or how do you go about it? I'm at a loss as to how inflexible this whole thing is, and we've been banging our head against a brick wall with MS for months about it.

 

Cheers

[rickjames]

Just giving this a small bump. I assume everyone just allows the O365 Store for all their staff and students then?