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.
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!
What work profile isn’t created by corporate is what I want to know. Can we use intune to get round this pointless feature?
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?
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
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.
Did you get the solution?
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.
Same for me. Maybe its time to file a bug to Microsoft…
I found the solution, just update/change the launcher if you have a Xiaomi for example.
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
Hi, is it still the scenario that COPE enrollment, suffers from not having possibility to enable Widgets from work profile?
https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/mem/intune/fundamentals/deployment-guide-enrollment-android
Android Enterprise corporate owned work profile (COPE)
Is this restriction coming from Intune or Google?
Are these options (enable/ disable) within a specific enrollment option, configurable or hard-coded?