Questions about develop add-in for outlook

Doron Tromer 20 Reputation points
2025-02-04T18:27:57.8733333+00:00

Hi,

My company, wants to create a solution for our users to perform certain actions directly from emails sent by our system. We are planning to develop an Outlook add-in and publish it to AppSource. However, we have a few questions we’d like to clarify before starting development:

  1. We want to create end-to-end (E2E) testing for our add-in across three different environments—dev, staging, and production. However, the manifest file is hardcoded with the production URL. Is there a built-in solution to make it work for each of these environments?
  2. We want to authenticate users using our login system without any SSO. Is there a recommended approach or built-in solution for user authentication? Currently, our system uses JWT tokens stored in cookies, but to make it work, we need to set SameSite=None for our cookies. What is the recommended way to handle this?
  3. We noticed that accessibility is a key requirement for AppSource approval. Are there any other important aspects we should focus on to ensure our add-in passes AppSource testing?
  4. When publishing our add-in to AppSource, do we need to define a release date in advance, or can we decide when to release it after it has been approved?
  5. If we publish our add-in to AppSource but later want to add features that are relevant only to the web app (and not the manifest), do we need to notify Microsoft about these changes?
  6. If we need to update the manifest after our add-in has already been approved, will the approval process take as long as the initial submission?
  7. Can we allow users to download the add-in for free but restrict certain features to paid users?
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A family of Microsoft email and calendar products.
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