Manage Teams apps in the Microsoft Teams admin center

You manage apps for your organization in Teams apps page in the Teams admin center portal. Use the Manage apps page to view and manage all Teams apps in your organization's app catalog, cater to prominent use cases for app management, define access to apps using policies, and more.

Screenshot of the Manage apps page.

To manage apps, you use policies to control permissions for users, installation of apps, and upload of custom apps created within your organization. To understand policies, see Overview of app policies.

To use Teams admin center, you must have a Global Admin or Teams Administrator role. For details, see Teams administrator roles and Microsoft 365 administrator roles.

Note

The Manage apps page isn't available in Microsoft 365 Government Community Cloud High (GCCH) or Department of Defense (DoD) deployments of Teams.

During the creation of an app, the developers create and add an app ID to the manifest file. You can view this external app ID on the Manage apps page after you enable the column External app ID from the column settings. You can also view it on the app details page of a custom app. The ID is applicable for custom apps only.

App management use cases and the available interfaces

The options to accomplish most of app management use cases are available in Teams admin center. In addition, some options are available in other portals or different pages in the Teams admin center.

App management tasks that are supported in admin center are in the table below.

App management use cases Link to the interface Documentation
Control which apps are available to users in your organization by allowing and blocking apps. You can also upload and approve custom apps. After managing apps on this page, you can use app permission and app setup policies to configure what apps are available for specific users in your organization's app store. Manage apps in Teams admin center Current article
App permission policies control what apps you want to make available to Teams users in your organization. You can use the Global (Org-wide) default policy and customize it, or you can create one or more policies to meet the needs of your organization. Permission policies Manage app permission policies
App setup policies control how apps are made available to a user with the Teams app. Use the Global (Org-wide default) policy and customize it or create custom policies and assign them to a set of users. Setup policies Manage app setup policies
You can develop and upload custom apps as app packages and make them available in your organization's app store. Org-wide app settings in Manage apps Manage custom app policies
You can customize the Teams app store with your organization's logo, custom background, or color. Customize store Customize your organization's app store
The Teams app usage report provides information about which apps in use, active users, and other app usage information. Usage reports Teams app usage report
Your users can add apps when they host meetings or chats with guests. They can also use apps shared by guests when they join meetings or chats hosted externally. The data policies of the hosting user's organization, and the data sharing practices of any third-party apps shared by that user's organization, are applied. External access App behavior depending on types of users
With guest access, you can provide access to applications and other Teams functionality to people outside your organization, while maintaining control over your corporate data. Guest access Guest access in Teams
Teams update policies are used to manage Teams and Office preview users that can see pre-release or preview features in the Teams app. Teams update policies Teams public preview

App management tasks that are supported on other portals are in the table below.

App management use cases Link to the interface Documentation
Manage licenses and subscriptions of third-party apps in Microsoft 365 admin center Microsoft 365 admin center Manage third-party app subscriptions
Audit Teams app events on Microsoft Purview compliance portal. Audit Teams activities
Applications can be granted permissions to your organization and its data by three methods: an admin consents to the application for all users, a user grants consent to the application, or an admin integrating an application and enabling self-service access or assigning users directly to the application. Verify the Graph permissions for apps. Verify the permissions that users provided or that the admins delegated. Azure AD portal Review permissions granted to applications

Allow and block apps

The Manage apps page is where you allow or block individual apps at the org level. The page displays all the available app and their current org-level app status. The list of apps includes apps provided by Microsoft, by third-party developers, and by developers within your organization.

To allow or block an app:

  1. Sign in to the Teams admin center and access Teams apps > Manage apps
  2. Select an app from the list of apps. You can search by the name of the app.
  3. Select Allow or Block option.

When you allow (or block) an app on the Manage apps page in Teams admin center, the particular app is allowed (or blocked) for all users in your organization. This method differs from the app permission policy in the context that allowing (or blocking) an app via permission policy, impacts only the specific users who are assigned the policy.

A user can install and use an app only when the app is allowed via the tenant-wide setting and allowed for the user via permission policy.

Manage user requests to allow apps

End-users can view, but not use, the blocked apps in Teams Store. For the blocked apps, an option is available to request admin approval. These requests are collated in Teams admin center and admins can view and manage the requests when they want to. We strongly recommend having a regular triage to check for end-user requests.

Request an admin to approve a blocked app by selecting the request approval option in Teams Store.

View a request

  1. Sign in to the Teams admin center and access Teams Apps > Manage apps.

    End-user requests for blocked apps are displayed in the Teams admin center in the column titled Requests by users.

  2. To view and check the number of requests for each app, sort the requests in the Requests by user column. You can't view the name of the users who requested an app.

  3. To allow an app, select the name of the app and it opens the app details page.

  4. Select Manage requests and complete the steps displayed in the popup dialog. Based on the method used to block an app, one or more of the following steps are required to unblock it:

If an admin allows an app, then Teams doesn't inform the end-user that their request is acted upon. The user can view the app in the Teams Store to check if they can add the app to their Teams client or not. If the app is approved by an admin, users can add it. Alternatively, if and admin doesn't approve the request and dismisses it, then end-users can request it again.

Dismiss a user request

  1. Select the name of the app for which you want to dismiss the user requests.
  2. Select Manage requests and select Dismiss all requests on the dialog box.
  3. When a request is dismissed, it resets the user requests to zero.

Admins can approve a user request by allowing an app or dismiss the request and not take any action.

If an admin dismisses a request, it doesn't inform the end-user that their request is acted upon. After an admin dismisses a request, the end-user can request the app again.

Allow the apps that are blocked by the developers

When a developer publishes an app to the Teams store, some apps might need an admin to configure the app. The admins make the app available to the end-users when the app is set up.

For example, Contoso Electronics is an app developer that created a help desk app for Microsoft Teams. Contoso Electronics wants its customers to set up certain properties of the app so that when users interact with the app, it functions as expected. Before an admin allows the application, it will show as Blocked by publisher in the Teams admin center and is hidden from end-users by default. After following the publisher's guidance to set up the app, you can make it available to users by changing the status to Allowed.

Screenshot of blocked by publisher status in Teams admin center.

For information on how developers block an app by default, see Hide app until admin approves.

Manage org-wide app settings

Use org-wide app settings to control whether users with an F license get the tailored frontline app experience, whether users can install third-party apps, and whether users can upload or interact with custom apps in your organization. Org-wide app settings govern the behavior for all users and override any other app permission policies assigned to users.

Note

To learn how to use org-wide app settings in Microsoft 365 Government - Government Community Cloud High GCCH and Department of Defense (DoD) deployments of Teams, see Manage app permission policies in Teams.

  1. On Manage apps page, select Org-wide app settings. You can then configure the settings you want in the pane.

    Screenshot of the Org-wide app settings pane on the Manage apps page

  2. Under Tailored apps, turn off or turn on Show tailored apps. When this setting is on, users with an F license get the tailored frontline app experience. This experience pins the most relevant apps in Teams for frontline workers. To learn more, see Tailor Teams apps for your frontline workers.

    This feature is available for F licenses. Other license types will be supported in the future.

  3. Under Third-party apps, turn off or turn on these settings to control access to third-party apps:

    • Allow third-party apps: This controls whether users can use third-party apps. If you turn off this setting, your users won't be able to install or use any third-party apps and the app status of these apps is displayed as Blocked org-wide in the table.

      Note

      When Allow third-party apps is off, outgoing webhooks are still enabled for all users, but you can control them at the user level by allowing or blocking the Outgoing Webhook app through app permission policies. Note that if you have existing app permission policies for Microsoft apps that use the Allow specific apps and block all others setting, and you want to enable outgoing webhooks for users, add the Outgoing Webhook app to the list.

      Note

      Teams users can add apps when they host meetings or chats with people from other organizations. They can also use apps shared by people in other organizations when they join meetings or chats hosted by those organizations. The data policies of the hosting user's organization, as well as the data sharing practices of any third-party apps shared by that user's organization, are applied.

    • Allow any new third-party apps published to the store by default: This controls whether new third-party apps that are published to the Teams app store become automatically available in Teams. You can only set this option if you allow third-party apps.

  4. Under Custom apps, turn off or turn on Allow interaction with custom apps. This setting controls whether users can interact with custom apps. To learn more, see Manage custom app policies and settings in Teams.

  5. Select Save for org-wide app settings to take effect.

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