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We have setup and are hosting a centrally deployed Add-in for Excel developed with the OfficeJS API. We have had success in building, hosting, and testing the Add-in, but are now seeing a very strange issue that we are having trouble debugging. For context, the Add-in is developed with React, the OfficeJS API, and is intended to be loaded within Excel and primarily interacted with via the taskpane window.

Now that we have a working Add-in, we have deployed the Add-in to our first client using Centralized Deployment (https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/office/dev/add-ins/publish/centralized-deployment) for the Client's associated Office 365 account. When deploying, we originally only deployed to a certain subset of users while finalizing testing, but since we have updated the "Assign Users" setting to "Everyone". We are now running into a strange issue where some of our users in the account are able to access the add-in, and some are not. It should also be noted that all of the users who originally had access still have access; it seems only a subset of the newly authorized users are unable to access the add-in.

So far, we have tried a number of things to re-create and/or resolve the issue, but have had no success:

  • Setting up new accounts - when setting up a new account, the new account seems to have access to the Add-in as expected. We are unable to re-create the bad state some users are experiencing.
  • Clearing Excel Cache - we have had users clear their Excel application and web cache, but nether has resulted in changes to access.
  • Logging in/out - we have worked with users to sign-out, clear cache, and sign-in again but this does not update any access settings for the Add-in.
  • Attempting to Manually "Insert" the Add-in - when opening the "Insert" tab and selecting "My Add-ins" menu from Excel, the user does not have the Add-in listed under the "Admin Managed" tab. If the user attempts to "Refresh" it still does not change anything.

We are starting to meet with some of the users who are experiencing the issue to further investigate, so any advice or further debugging tips would be greatly appreciated!

mmwim
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  • Please clarify what you mean by "unable to access the add-in". What exactly goes wrong an when? – Rick Kirkham Apr 07 '20 at 18:49
  • Hi Rick. We have a workbook which is set to automatically load the add-in in a taskpane; when these users attempt to open the workbook they will see the taskpane open but will see an error message which states: "ADD-IN ERROR You don't have permission to use this add-in. Contact your system administrator to request access.". To clarify, this error message is displayed within the taskpane of Excel. – mmwim Apr 07 '20 at 20:27
  • It should also be noted that the users who can access the add-in are able to automatically load the taskpane on the workbook just fine. – mmwim Apr 07 '20 at 20:34
  • What happens if the users getting this message try to open the add-in's URL directly in a browser window? Does the page open? – Rick Kirkham Apr 07 '20 at 21:31
  • Is the workbook at a shared location or does each user have their own copy? Also, are your users working with Excel on Windows, Excel on Mac, or Excel on the web? – Rick Kirkham Apr 07 '20 at 21:33
  • Rick, how would I go about accessing the URL to view the add-in in the browser? All of our users are currently using either Excel on Windows or Excel on Mac. We have users from both platforms who are able to access, as well as those who are experiencing the issue. We have been able to create new accounts for the users who had previously experienced the issue and that seems to fix it. The new account can access the add-in from the same sheet. – mmwim Apr 08 '20 at 20:14
  • And the sheet itself is in a shared location but is read-only, which requires each user to download a copy of the sheet to use on their end. – mmwim Apr 08 '20 at 20:15
  • The URL of the add-in should be in the SourceLocation element of the manifest. – Rick Kirkham Apr 08 '20 at 20:24
  • The impacted users are able to access the Add-in's URL directly without issue. – mmwim Apr 09 '20 at 20:16
  • Rick, we are still seeing this issue and it is a serious issue for our launch logistics. Do you have any more insight or someone we can contact? – mmwim Apr 24 '20 at 18:19
  • Since the issue only happens in the context of the add-in running in Excel, it looks like it might be a bug in Office. I think your best bet now is to raise this issue on the [office-js](https://github.com/OfficeDev/office-js/issues/new/choose) repo. – Rick Kirkham Apr 24 '20 at 21:59
  • Thanks Rick, we've logged an issue report. – mmwim Apr 29 '20 at 06:49

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