As an IT guy, is managing your user's Office Add-ins an headache? Thinking about deploying them make your brain hurt? The Office 2013 Telemetry Dashboard is your aspirin...

Office IT Pro Blog - Let's manage add-ins using Telemetry Dashboard

"HAVE YOU EVER WANTED TO MANAGE ADD-INS FOR OFFICE? If you are an IT pro who manages application use, you might want to manage add-ins for Office as well. If you can prevent end users from running non-approved add-ins that might cause issues or slow performance, then you can reduce your support costs. With Office 2013, we are providing a new feature that enables you to manage add-in usage.

Using Office 2013 Telemetry Dashboard, you can monitor add-in usage along with performance and other issues. With the collected data, you can decide which add-ins should be managed. This article describes how to manage add-ins for Office by using Telemetry Dashboard.

MANAGE ADD-INS USING TELEMETRY DASHBOARD

First, you need to deploy Telemetry Dashboard. Take a look at this Technet article for details of Telemetry Dashboard deployment.

Once you have you successfully set up the Telemetry Dashboard, view the Solutions worksheet in Telemetry Dashboard. In the Solutions worksheet, you can find a link named Add-in management mode in the top-right corner, as shown in the following screenshot. Click the link to view the Add-in management worksheet.

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Wow, that looks pretty awesome. Now I have a love-hate relationship due to being a victim of Group Policy decisions, and while this uses GP (which makes total sense BTW), I still think this looks pretty cool. I mean if you have 10 users that's one thing, but can you imaging the pain of deploying a custom add-in to your users when you have hundreds or thousands? This looks like it would be just the ticket!

 

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