Teams is a great program for intra and inter-office communication. From video conferences, meetings, chats and Teams Phone services, Teams is the central hub for your communications. While it’s certainly not perfect, it’s pretty darn good and there are a ton of add-on apps that allow you to expand on that functionality.
The problem is that the Teams app catalog will (by default) let you install anything. While that’s fine sometimes, it’s likely not fine for your business. Why? Many of the available third-party apps don’t have any documented data security controls in-place. So if you’re doing business in a compliance-regulated industry (HIPAA, etc…), those those third party apps could be sending your data to their servers, which may or may not be compliant with the regulations you fall under.
So we are taking the steps to lock down third-party Teams application installations for our clients. We’re leaving the ability to install Microsoft’s Teams add-ons, as Microsoft generally doesn’t mess around with compliance and your data is less likely to be sent somewhere it shouldn’t. But otherwise, other third party Teams applications and add-ons are going to be blocked by default (which is our usual policy when it comes to regular computer applications). If you are a client of ours and need a third-party application installed, reach out to the helpdesk so we can go through the proper security and approvals process to help keep your business environment safer.