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Selectively remove tiles from the Office 365 App Launcher

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Mark Wilson

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This time last year, Office 365 gained an App Launcher as part of a new navigation experience for Office 365 on the web. Users can add and remove tiles from this launcher – and administrators can provide new tiles to point to corporate resources – for example a CRM platform or the company intranet.

Unfortunately, not all customers want their users to use all of the features and functionality in Office 365 and the administrative controls to manage the App Launcher for all users are limited.  I’d argue that part of consuming a cloud service is adapting to new features and functionality as they are released but that doesn’t go down well with everyone, often leaving me trying to find ways to disable or hide parts of the service. The following settings may help to selectively remove tiles from the Office 365 App Launcher but It’s not always straightforward – and it’s also subject to change (with a new admin center on the way):

  • Admin: revoke a user’s administrative rights.
  • Instant messaging and web conferencing: remove the Skype for Business Online licence and this functionality will disappear (there is no associated tile).
  • Mail, Calendar, People, Tasks: remove the Exchange Online licence and these tiles will go too.
  • OneDrive for Business, Sites, Office Web Apps: remove the SharePoint Online licence (which also requires that you remove the Office Online licence).
  • Office 365 Store: a switch was recently added to disable this tile, under Service Settings, User Purchasing, Display Office 365 App Store Tile.
  • OneDrive for Business: hide in the SharePoint Admin Center settings, under show or hide options.
  • Office 365 groups: Using PowerShell against Exchange Online, edit the Outlook Web Access policy with Set-OwaMailboxPolicy -GroupCreationEnabled $False -Identity PolicyName. If you only want to apply the change to a subset of users, create a new policy and apply it accordingly.
  • Sites: hide in the SharePoint Admin Center settings, under show or hide options.
  • Delve: turn off the Office Graph in the SharePoint Admin Center settings. Delve will still be there in parts though: for example when users access their profile.
  • Sway: turn off under Service Settings, Sway, Let people in your organization use Sway. Unfortunately it won’t remove the tile [update: yes it will now!].
  • Video: in the SharePoint Admin Center settings, under Streaming Video Service, disable streaming video through Azure Media Services and disable the Video Portal.
  • Yammer: for this one you’re between a rock and a hard place: Yammer Basic is anarchic; Convert to Yammer Enterprise and the tile will be visible to users – you cannot turn it off.

Some of these options merely hide capabilities – they may not be entirely disabled – and my recommendation would always be to leave settings enabled and teach users how to make use of the platform.  In particular, turning off the Office Graph may have wider reaching implications.

Further reading

Meet the Office 365 App Launcher

Comments

9 responses to “Selectively remove tiles from the Office 365 App Launcher”

  1. Recording a video of a PowerPoint presentation – markwilson.it

    […] the file to MP4, hopefully ready for distribution… now, if only they hadn’t asked me to turn off Office 365 Video I’d have a means to share the […]

  2. Short takes: SharePoint/Delve and shortlinks; CESG guidance on Office 365; removing Sway from the App Launcher – markwilson.it

    […] I wrote a couple of months ago when describing how to selectively remove tiles from the Office 365 App Launcher, disabling Sway in Office 365 didn’t used to remove the tile from the launcher. Since […]

  3. Mary avatar
    Mary

    Could you please update your post to include “Planner”? How to disable and hide its tile from the Apps Launcher?

  4. Mark Wilson avatar
    Mark Wilson

    Sorry Mary, this post was based on experience from an implementation before Planner existed. I’m coming to the conclusion now (and with Microsoft’s drive for broader consumption of all of the services in Office 365, not just the core ones, this is ever-more apparant) that the new functionality is just there and that disabling/removing parts of the Office 365 service is less and less of an option.

  5. Lou Mickley avatar
    Lou Mickley

    Also, disabling groups with -GroupCreationEnabled does not work with Planner. People can still create groups. See the new approach here: https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/brismith/2016/06/06/microsoft-plannera-few-common-support-answers/

  6. bkursar avatar
    bkursar

    Hi Mark, Any experience removing Power BI App?

  7. Rob Andrzejewski avatar
    Rob Andrzejewski

    In our instance, even though we use Sharepoint Online; for whatever reason – SP does not show in the app launcher. Any ideas?

  8. Eric Schrader avatar
    Eric Schrader

    @Rob, you probably don’t have SP licenses associated to users? Its an honor system for licensing.

    Good article. Also to get the app launcher to update, you have to sign out and clear cache/cookies in my experience. They have some heavy caching for performance.

  9. Adopting cloud services means being ready for constant change – markwilson.it

    […] I’ve seen many organisations moving to cloud services (mostly Office 365 and Azure) and stick with their current thinking. They do things like try to map drive letters to OneDrive because that’s what users are used to, instead of showing them new (and often better) ways of working. They try to use old versions of Office with the latest services and wonder why the user experience is degraded. They think about the on-premises workloads (Exchange, Lync/Skype for Business, SharePoint) instead of the potential provided by the whole productivity platform that they have bought licences to use. They try to turn parts of the service off or hide them from users. […]

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