New Setting in Teams App Setup Policy
Office 365 Notification MC202761 (January 31) and its follow-up MC202765 (to apologize that Microsoft started to deploy the update before announcing it) inform tenants that Teams App Setup policies include a new setting to control if users can customize the set of apps in the left navigation rail in the desktop and browser clients or the bottom of the screen for mobile clients. The setting is turned on by default and all tenants should be able to change the Allow user pinning setting in Teams App Setup policies (Figure 1) by the end of February 2020.
Apart from the Teams Admin Center, you can also update App Setup policies using PowerShell. For instance, here’s how to scan for all policies in the tenant that currently allow user app pinning to update the setting to Off.
# Get all Teams App Setup policies, find those that allow app pinning
# and update them to disable app pinning
Get-CsTeamsAppSetupPolicy |?{$_.AllowUserPinning -eq $True} | Set-CsTeamsAppSetupPolicy -AllowUserPinning $False
It can take a couple of hours before a change in an App Setup policy is respected by clients. App pinning is only supported for tenant users. Guest users are restricted to a default set of apps (Activity, Teams, Chat, and Files).
Pinning and Unpinning Apps
When the app setup policy assigned to their account allows app pinning, users can pin an app by selecting it from the Apps menu (sometimes displayed as [...]) and then choosing Pin from the right-click menu (Figure 2). When an app is pinned, Teams displays the app icon in the left-hand navigation rail. In Figure 2, Planner is an example of a pinned app.
When the App Setup policy assigned to their account blocks app pinning, the user doesn't see the pin option (Figure 3).
If the Teams App Setup policy assigned to an account is updated to block user app pinning, Teams removes any apps pinned to the left-hand navigation bar. If the policy is then updated to allow user app pinning, users mist re-pin their pinned apps.
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