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Back in April of 2024, Microsoft added a new entry on the Microsoft 365 roadmap website about a unified management for Microsoft Teams, Outlook and Microsoft 365 (M365). Thus going forward, any changes made in the Microsoft 365 admin center app or the Teams admin center app would also have affected all three clients.
In the M365 roadmap entry under ID 393931, the company explained the new unification effort. It wrote:
Microsoft Teams: Microsoft 365 admin centers – Manage Teams apps that work on Outlook and Microsoft 365 App
Administrators using the Microsoft 365 admin center and Teams admin center who manage Teams apps that work on Outlook and the Microsoft 365 App will be able to apply their changes across all three clients (Teams, Outlook and Microsoft 365 App). Before this update, changes made through the Integrated Apps section in the Microsoft 365 admin center would only affect these apps on Outlook and the Microsoft 365 App; similarly, changes made in the Teams admin center would exclusively affect Teams. With this change, management of these apps will be unified across Teams, Outlook and Microsoft 365 App.
Back then, Microsoft announced that the general availability rollout would start towards the end of the second half of July 2024.
However, Microsoft has now put this "on hold" for the time being as it has informed so via the Microsoft 365 Admin Center portal. It has been labelled as a "major change". The message says:
Unified management of Teams apps in Teams, Outlook, and the Microsoft 365 app is on hold, with further guidance by late May 2025. The rollout will streamline app management across platforms, consolidating settings into a single platform. Review app and tenant settings collaboratively and consider potential impacts of merge rules.
Similar to other major changes, Microsoft had devised a two-phase rollout for this unification project in order to help avoid problems and issues with deployment and compatibility. The company has provided details about their progress. It adds that more details will be provided later this month:
This rollout will happen in two major phases. Unified App Management can apply only to tenants that have migrated to app centric management in Teams admin center, as communicated in MC688930 (Updated) Teams admin center: App centric management and changes to app permission policies (November 2023).
Phase 1 | General Availability (Worldwide): We will begin rolling out late-January 2025 (previously mid-December 2024) is now on hold (previously late March 2025), with further guidance to be provided by late May 2025 (previously late April). This phase applies to tenants with no modified settings in either the Microsoft 365 admin center (Integrated apps) or the Teams admin center for organization-wide defaults, app deployment, app availability, or block/unblock. No merge rules apply to these tenants, but after this phase, any app management setting configured in either admin centers will apply to all relevant hosts.
Phase 2: We will update this post with a timeline and more details in May 2025 (previously April 2025). This phase is applicable to tenants with app settings that have differences between Microsoft 365 admin center (Integrated apps) and Teams admin center.
If you have access to the Microsoft 365 Admin Center portal, you can find the entry here under ID MC796790.