On

Finally and after almost an eight months wait since the first time I learned that office store Seller dashboard will be merged with other developer stores to become one single Microsoft Developer dashboard.

I was checking my Seller dashboard account as usual and I noticed that the new dashboard has been rolled out and now I can access all the apps in one central location.

My first interaction with the Seller dashboard was back in late 2012 when Office store was a beta version. I remember that I had two major issues when it comes to the provider/developer experience these issues caused me a great amount of frustration.

The first issue- If your add-in is free, you will have absolutely no idea who downloaded the add-in but if it's paid you can have a limited information extracted from the sales report which gives you a very simple tabular view of the sales transactions. This information includes only the following:
(Market, Country, State if the buyer within the US market and the local currency purchase amount)

There was no single way of providing any kind of information about the acquisition any kind of user contact details.

With the new Developer dashboard an additional option has been added to the add-ins. This option allows the add-in provider to store the lead information into a target system of choice by a simple click of a button (Edit Lead Configuration). This option is available for both Free and Paid applications.

The available targets for the lead information are:

  1. Dynamics CRM Online
  2. SalesForce
  3. Azure Table 
  4. Marketo
  5. AzureBlob 
To be honest seeing this option after all these years makes me super excited.  Now Office Add-in providers can use the store as a proper lead generation tool . They can be more proactive and contact application consumers. Understand more why conversion rate for a specific application is low,and seek a proper feedback in order to improve and provide a better service.

In addition to these benefits, having such mature platform will improve the quality of the add-ins listed on the store as the providers now can use it as a proper marketing tool.

The second bit- I always find the existing reports very basic and gives me only some limited metrics (view/download/purchase/trial) which spans only the current week and the past three weeks. There was no way  to see my add-in performance this quarter vs. same quarter last year unless I manage somehow to store the data somewhere else. 

The new dashboard has a new report called acquisitions which unfortunately, I couldn't make it to work (currently I'm getting a blank page) but I presume that this report will answer  many questions I have. If you still need access to the old reports you can access them by viewing the legacy reports.



Another exciting part is having "Teams App" as an additional app type that you can submit to the office store. Although,  in the Office store website there is no actual category for Teams Apps yet.