Bye Bye Seller Dashboard: Microsoft Teams App Developers soon to enjoy new App Submission & Management Experience

I’m slowly wading through Microsoft Ignite 2019 content, and pulling out what I think are interesting announcements. As much as I can do, I’m trying to highlight things which may not have been widely picked up, but which impact Microsoft Teams developers.

In a session titled Develop great workspaces with the Microsoft Teams platform: What’s new and what’s coming, Bill Bliss (Platform Architect and one of the founders of Teams) broke news that in the future, developers will be able to enjoy a better experience for submitting apps to the Teams App Store.

Right now, if you want to submit Microsoft Teams Apps then you have to use Seller Dashboard. This can be a bit of a cumersome and complex operation, and Seller Dashboard is missing many of the configuration and reporting tools of a modern app store. In Bill’s words: “today you use this really old tool, and which is broken a lot of the time…that thing has been on its last legs for a while”.

Soon, app submission will move over to Partner Center. This is the ‘standard’ mechanism to publish apps to other Microsoft stores, such as Azure, Windows and Xbox, so it’s really good to see Microsoft Teams being able to use this as well.

This wasn’t mentioned, but hopefully this will also mean that, along with the move, comes the ability for developers to optionally charge money for their apps. I think this would be a worthwhile addition and would bring incentives for developers to build more involved, more complicated, richer apps. Certainly, Partner Centre has more capabilities to offer this than Seller Dashboard does today, so it’ll be interesting to see if this is a positive side effect of the move.

No details on exact timelines other than “just about ready to move over”, but watch this space and I’ll do a walkthrough of how to submit using Partner Center once it’s done.

In the meantime, you can watch the entire session here: