How to add Widgets for Work Profile Apps

      11 Comments on How to add Widgets for Work Profile Apps

In this blog, I’ll show you how to add widgets for Work Profile Apps on Personal owned work profile devices (BYOD). By using a work profile on personal Android devices (BYOD) you can separate business data and applications from personal data. You create a closed environment, this has the advantage that you can better protect business information. However, it also creates problems. For example, the home screen is not in the work profile, if you want to add a widget to a business application like the Outlook calendar it creates problems. Fortunately there is a solution for this which I will show.

 

Enabling Widgets for Work Profile Apps

By default, Intune does not adjust the setting (not configured) and depends on the OS whether adding Widgets is allowed. The setting is called “Allow widgets from work profile apps” and can be found in the device restrictions for the personally-owned work profile. It is not yet available for the Corporate-owned work profile at this time.

 

In the example below you can see that when it is not allowed, you can only create shortcuts to work profile for example, the Outlook Calender or Email. By the way, on the devices (Nokia, Samsung) I tested it with, it is off by default.

 

To allow widgets to the work profile, you only need to enable the “Allow widgets from work profile apps” setting.

 

As you can see in the screenshot below, it is possible to add both shortcuts and widgets for supported applications in the work profile. Examples of supported applications are: Outlook, Onenote.

 

I hope you liked this blog about Android management using Intune. Just leave a reply if you have questions or remarks about this post.

11 thoughts on “How to add Widgets for Work Profile Apps

  1. Stian

    Thanks for mentioning “It is not yet available for the Corporate-owned work profile at this time.”. Because that’s what I’m looking for 🙁

    Good article!

    Reply
  2. Richard Jones

    What work profile isn’t created by corporate is what I want to know. Can we use intune to get round this pointless feature?

    Reply
  3. Luis

    Are you aware that the option for blocking widgets is not present? It seems that “not configured” is the only option, but this is not the same as “block”, right?

    Reply
    1. Aad Lutgert Post author

      Hi Luis,

      The setting only allows you to add widgets for apps in the work profile. When you do not configure the setting (not configured) then it’s not possible to add a widget for an app in the work profile. It will still be possible to add widgets for apps outside of the work profile.

      regards, Aad

      Reply
  4. Simon Edwards

    I’ve applied this config profile and can see the widgets are now available, however I still can’t place them. After selecting either the calendar or mail widget, all the options are unabilbe and there is a lock symbol in the app. I’m not sure what this is referring to.

    Reply
    1. Mark

      Simon, did you ever find an answer to this? We are hitting this too. Widget can be dragged over but the account is greyed out.

      Reply
    1. Richard Jones

      Lucky for you then. I’m not changing to a chinese owned phone, sticking with my South Korean one 🙂

      This is such an annoying feature (or lack of feature) from Microsoft but not surprised as all their apps have some missing functionality for corporate users

      Reply

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