Installing Outlook add-in for specific users

NOTE: I was using Office 365 so the cmdlets below should work in Exchange Online. For on-premises installations, you might need to get the user IDs in a different way.

If you're using Office 365, you might want to have a look at Centralized Deployment.

Goal: to install Outlook add-in available only for specific users and to make it enable by default

1st attempt:

If you open Exchange admin center > organization > add-ins and try to add it from there:

you’ll not be able to set it provided only to specific user. You can only set its default state for enabled/disabled or make it available to nobody:

2nd attempt:

This time using Windows PowerShell:

New-App -Url "https://xxxxxxxx.azurewebsites.net/app-manifest-tst.xml" -OrganizationApp -UserList robert@domain.com,peter@domain.com -DefaultStateForUser Enabled

Surprisingly, this will install add-in enabled by default for all users.

3rd attempt:

This time I read the documentation more carefully and added this:

-ProvidedTo SpecificUsers

Full command:

New-App -Url "https://xxxxxxxx.azurewebsites.net/app-manifest-tst.xml" -OrganizationApp -UserList robert@domain.com,piotr@domain.com -DefaultStateForUser Enabled -ProvidedTo SpecificUsers

This time it worked correctly.

To enabled add-in for another user you need to add him/her to UserList:

$t = Get-App -OrganizationApp |Where-Object Displayname -eq "Add-in Name"
$t.UserList = $t.UserList + "marcin@domain.com"
$t | Set-App -UserList $t.UserList -OrganizationApp

For Exchange on-premises, get DistinguishedName another way (credits to @Kevin Moore):

$userToAdd = (Get-ADUser YourADAccountHere).DistinguishedName
$t.UserList = $t.UserList + $userToAdd

If you receive an error ‘There are multiple recipients matching the identity’ you can use the following code:

for ($i=0; $i -lt ($t.UserList.Count); $i++) {
$t.UserList[$i] = (Get-Mailbox $t.UserList[$i] -RecipientTypeDetails UserMailbox).userprincipalname