Publish your app to Microsoft 365, Outlook, and Teams Stores

Developers can provide their Microsoft Teams apps to an individual, team, organization, or anyone who wants to use it. How you distribute depends on several factors including users' needs, business, technical requirements, and your goals for the app. Developers can also distribute their apps directly to the store inside Microsoft Teams and reach millions of users around the world. If your app is also featured in the store, you can instantly reach potential customers. In this module, you’ll learn how to publish your app to Teams Store, focusing primarily on app validation process, best time to complete this module is during the planning stage of building an app.

Teams app developers play a key role in ensuring that their app adds value for users using it within Teams. As a developer, you must familiarize yourself with Microsoft commercial marketplace policy #100.8, which states that “Apps must provide enough value to justify the investment it takes to learn and use them. Your app should provide significant benefits such as enhanced efficiency, innovative features, or strategic advantages. Simple utilities, apps with limited scope, or apps that duplicate offerings in well-served areas aren't a good fit for the commercial marketplace. Apps must provide a useable software solution.”
This module is intended to give you an overview of Microsoft commercial certification policy #100.8 via real-world scenarios related to #100.8 policy failures that are encountered during app validation with suggestions on how you can avoid them. Using the example of a hypothetical Contoso Polls app, the module also shows how you, as an app developer, can provide significant value to users within your Teams app. Upon completion, this module helps you to make the right product decisions for your app during the design and envisioning stage to avoid a costly rework of the app's workflows during app validation, should your app be deemed to not meet Microsoft commercial marketplace policy #100.8.

Teams platform has evolved and it now integrates with the broader Microsoft 365 ecosystem. Extending your Teams app across Microsoft 365 not only increases your app's audience but also enables you to create unique app experiences for Teams, Outlook, and Microsoft 365 environments from a single codebase. This extension allows users to remain in their work context within Microsoft 365 while using your app, simplifies the process for them, and provides IT administrators with a consolidated app management and deployment workflow.

The extensibility incorporates app capabilities like personal tabs and messaging extensions within Outlook and Microsoft 365 apps. For example, Teams personal tab apps can also run in both Outlook and Microsoft 365. Also, search based Teams message extensions now work in Outlook on the web, iOS, and Windows desktop.

By utilizing the latest Teams app manifest version 1.13 or later and Microsoft Teams JavaScript client library (TeamsJS), you can use the consolidated Microsoft 365 app development process to deliver streamlined deployment, installation, and administrative experience to your customers. After your app is published as a Microsoft 365 enabled Teams app, your app is discoverable as an installable app in the Outlook and Microsoft 365 app stores, along with the Teams store. The app uses the same permissions granted in Teams and can be managed by Teams admins across Microsoft 365 for users in their organization.

You can keep track of the current supported Teams app platform elements across Microsoft 365 (Teams, Outlook, and Microsoft 365 as application hosts) from extending Teams apps across Microsoft 365.

In this module, the focus is to ensure that, as a developer, if you want to extend your Teams apps across Microsoft 365, you must build apps that meet the store validation guidelines. By doing so, we aim to reduce the time it takes to submit and publish for such apps, while enhancing the quality of app submissions. This module is designed for you in the planning and development stages of your extensible app. It offers guidance on creating a compatible and compliant app that can seamlessly extend across Microsoft 365.