Deploying Office WebApps (PWA) with file handlers via Intune

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For your frontline users, the M365 F-sku licenses are an excellent option, you get all of the advantages of an E-sku, just without the Office apps.

These days even your frontline users are going to need to click mailto links on webpages or emails and the last thing an enteprise admin needs is the Mail app suddenly being used.

Fortunately Edge has the option to deploy Progressive Web Apps (PWA) including desktop shortcuts so you can publish Office apps to appear on the users destkop AND set it as the default mail client, all via Intune.

For this we will be using Settings Catalog so first lets create a new policy:

Screenshot of Settings Catalog

In Settings Picker, first step is to add the PWA apps and we are looking for “Configure list of force-installed Web Apps” under “Microsoft Edge”

Screenshot of template settings "Configure list of force0install web apps" Box is checked

Once you have enabled the setting, you need to enter JSON code into the field, for all office apps use this. I have included file handling which is currently an experimental feature (see here), but will give you options should it go GA in the future, for now, opening office files doesn’t work out of the box.

[
	{      		
		"fallback_app_name": "Word", 	
        "file_handlers": [
            {
                "action": "/openFile",
                "accept": {
                    "text/*": [
                        ".docx"
                    ]
                }
            }
        ],	
		"create_desktop_shortcut": true, 
     		"default_launch_container": "window",
      		"url": "https://word.office.com" 
  	},
    {      		
		"fallback_app_name": "Excel", 
        "file_handlers": [
            {
                "action": "/openFile",
                "accept": {
                    "text/*": [
                        ".xlsx"
                    ]
                }
            }
        ],		
		"create_desktop_shortcut": true, 
     		"default_launch_container": "window",
      		"url": "https://excel.office.com" 
  	},
    {      		
		"fallback_app_name": "PowerPoint", 	
        "file_handlers": [
            {
                "action": "/openFile",
                "accept": {
                    "text/*": [
                        ".pptx"
                    ]
                }
            }
        ],	
		"create_desktop_shortcut": true, 
     		"default_launch_container": "window",
      		"url": "https://powerpoint.office.com" 
  	},
 	{
      		"fallback_app_name": "Outlook",
 		"create_desktop_shortcut": true,
      		"default_launch_container": "window",
      		"url": "https://outlook.office.com"
 	}
]

NOTE: It will escape the speechmarks so don’t worry about backslashes suddenly appearing.

Now we need to set Outlook PWA as the default for mailto links.

We need to set the file handlers by setting the “Register Protocol Handlers” setting, this one is in Microsoft Edge – Default Settings (users can override)

Screenshot of settings catalog "Register protocol handlers", box is checked

In here you want to add this JSON:

[ { "url": "https://outlook.office.com/?extsrc=mailtou0026url=%s", "default": true, "protocol": "mailto" } ]

Once assigned, your users will see desktop shortcuts for Office apps (including the icon) which open up the web versions. Clicking a mailto link will automatically launch the Outlook PWA app and start a new email.

2 thoughts on “Deploying Office WebApps (PWA) with file handlers via Intune”

  1. Thanks for writing this article. We’ve been trying to get this setup for our shared computers for our frontline workers which do not have fully licensed desktop office products, but users have documents that they need to open like word or excel. If we’re reading this correctly, we should be able to associate a file handler to open a word file from the desktop that would open in the user’s office portal app? Is our understanding of this correct? We’ve tried about everything we can think of to get this to work.

    Reply

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