Microsoft 365 add-ins blocked

Today one of ´my colleagues had an issue on her customer laptop. The issue was that she was not able to use the “Open in Excel” funcitonality in Dynamics 365 for Operations and Supply Chain. Apparently someone had blocked the Office addin that was required to make it work.

There are 2 options to handle this… the easiest (and less secure) option is to allow the user to run and install Office Addins. The setting resides in the Office Admin Center and requires an Admin to change it. If some one has disabled it, go the Office Admin Portal – Setting – Org Setting – User owned apps and services and enable “Let users access the Office Store”

The second option is to provision the specific apps to the users that need them. This is also done by an admin in the Office Admin Portal.

In the Office Admin Portal, go to Settings, Integrated Apps and click Add-ins

Click Deploy Add-in

Click Next

Click Choose from the Store

Seach for Dynamics and click Add next to the Microsoft Dynamics Office Add-in

Click Continue

Now you will get the option to set which users will get the add.in deployed. You have the options of Everyone, an Azure AD Group (preferred) and just you. The last option is used for testing and you will later in the wizard get the option to change.

Note: If you are logged in ad Global Admin, that is the user that will get the add-in. You should preferably not use your “regular user” to manage your organizations infrastructure. If you are curious, google Tiering…

Verify that your deployment was successful

You are now done. If everything works, now you get another option to assign which users should get the app.

You can click on the add-in and adjust the deployment scope.

That is it… Good Luck

Links
Prevent add-in downloads by turning off the Office Store across all clients (Except Outlook)
Deploy add-ins in the Microsoft 365 admin center

Office Add-in for Visual Studio crashing when using Open in Office for a DevOps Query

Hi…

Long Time no see… good to be back

I am making heavy use of DevOps queries in my daily tasks as release manager/scrum master at my customer. Especially when it comes to generating release notes.

Currently I have a query returning all DevOps Items, Ready for Release and tagged with Hotfix. I open them in Excel, format them a bit and paste them into ours Microsoft Teams Wiki. Excel really makes this table-tweaking much easier.

Today Excel kept crashing when I used Open in Excel and I could not figure out why. I used it successfully last week. After some googling I bumped into a forum post that told me to clear cache folders for Team Foundation Service. It helped !! Yay!!!

The article is linked below

Links:
https://developercommunity.visualstudio.com/content/problem/982029/azure-devops-add-on-crashes.html

Problems with Excel AddIn for Azure Devops for Visual Studio 2019

A couple of days ago I reinstalled my computer and since I usually go by “Newer is always Better” I installed Visual Studio 2019. When I was going to generate release notes for our latest release Excel Addin for DevOps did not work. I looked through the prerequisites and found nothing I missed… It should work… WTF

Well… after some research I found this forum post online saying that apparently there is an issue with Excel Addin included in the latest version of Visual Studio. The correct version is here: Azure DevOps Office® Integration 2019

Links:
https://developercommunity.visualstudio.com/content/problem/776394/issue-with-azure-devops-open-in-excel.html

Uninstalling Excel Addin

This one was an annoying one…

I had to help a customer uninstall the Excel addin for Dynamics 365 for Operations. This should be a simple task (everything is if you know how to do it). So I went into Excel Add-ins using File – Options – Add-Ins… No Dynamics Excel addin:

WFT!!! A nice person then showed me that there is another place for Excel Addins (obviously)… You go to Insert – My Add-ins… Presto!

/Johan