Outlook add-in not updating after publishing in partner center

Question

We updated an Office add-in offer in the Marketplace and got it approved.

However, existing users who already installed the add-in in their desktop Outlook did not get the update.

The add-in manifest in "%LOCALAPPDATA%\Microsoft\Office\16.0\Wef" is not updated in the Office add-in Manifests folder even after restarting the PC or reopening Outlook.

We found a workaround, which is to ask the user to reinstall the add-in themselves.

But it doesn't make sense to ask all users to do this every time we have an update.

Is there a way to make the add-in update automatically instead of requiring a manual reinstallation?

Answer 1

Hello David, thank you for submitting a question. Our Office Add-ins documentation has an article section that describes deploying updates to your add-in: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/office/dev/add-ins/publish/maintain-breaking-changes#deploy-updates

If you've updated the manifest, the article includes the following note:

Whenever you make a change to the manifest, you must raise the version number of the manifest.

• If the add-in uses the XML manifest, see Version element.
• If the add-in uses the unified manifest, see version property.

Have you tried raising the version number of the manifest?

Thanks,

Alison