Can i publish Office add-in without having a corporate/company?

Question

I have a website (non-profit) and would like to develop an Office add-in for my users to use. I do not plan to get any money from this website so I don't see a point of registering for a corporate. However, when trying to get my Office add-in published via Microsoft Partner Center, there is a step "Business Verification" in which they verify my business. My add-in gets rejected at this step because obviously I do not have any business/corporate for them to verify. Just wondering whether there is a way to publish an Office add-in without having a company/business?

Answer 1

No you do not need to register and you for sure do not need to be a partner. Why are you going to Partner Center ? All you need to do is publish the add-in on GitHub from VisualStudio (if that is what you are using). Let me know more about how you are developing the add-in and how do you want to distribute it to your users.

Reference: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/office/dev/add-ins/publish/publish

Answer 2

There are ways to distribute without using AppSource. See the options at Deploy and publish Office Add-ins, especially Centralized Deployment.

Answer 3

You can publish the manifest file on your web site, so everybody could install it. You just need to run a web app on any web server and keep the manifest file in sync with a web app URL. IT admins can deploy the add-in for the company while regular users can sideload it.

AppSource is more universal and reliable way of deploying for everybody, see Make your solutions available in Microsoft AppSource and within Office for more information.