Enabling Apps, Licences & Plugins

Enabling Apps, Licences & Plugins

1. What it is

The Apps page is where a tenant admin turns platform capabilities on and off. Every feature in MangoApps — scheduling, leave, recognition, forms, chat, and dozens more — is a marketplace app that an admin explicitly enables, configures, and rolls out to users. This page is the control surface for that lifecycle.

• Access: Admin → Apps → All Apps. Requires the Administrator or Super Admin role.
• What it is not: This page does not purchase licences or change your subscription. Licensing is granted by your account manager or through your subscription tier. This page is where you enable apps your organisation already has access to, and control who sees them.

2. Standing it up

There is no first-time setup — the Apps page is available to every admin immediately. The work is enabling the apps your organisation needs:

1. Go to Admin → Apps → All Apps. You see every app in the catalogue, grouped by category. A status filter lets you narrow to Enabled, Available, or Requires Licence.
2. Find the app you want. Click Enable. If the app requires a licence your organisation does not yet have, you will see a message naming the bundle it belongs to and directing you to contact your account manager.
3. A newly enabled app starts as admin-only — your users cannot see it yet. The confirmation message tells you this and links to access management.
4. Configure the app before rolling it out. Click the app name to open its detail page, then click Configure to set its options. A “Setup Health” badge on the Apps list flags apps still running on default settings.
5. Roll it out. On the app’s detail page, open Access management and either click Publish to everyone (all users see it) or add visibility rules to grant access to specific groups.
6. Confirm it worked: your users should now see the app in their sidebar or Apps panel (if pinned), and at its route.

3. How it fits together

Licence → Enable → Configure → Publish — four gates, in order. An app that is licensed but not enabled does nothing. An app that is enabled but not published is visible only to admins. Skipping the configure step is safe but means the app runs on its schema defaults, which may not match your organisation’s needs. Understanding these four stages is the key to a smooth rollout.

Licensing — Most apps are licensed: they are marked as requiring a licence and stay unavailable until your business is entitled to them. Entitlement comes from one of four sources: a direct licence grant from your account manager, inclusion in your platform tier, inclusion in a bundle your organisation subscribes to, or an active per-app subscription.

Pay-as-you-go apps have no licence gate at all. They are available to every tenant and bill on their own usage meter rather than by seat. Most are on automatically. Four are deliberately not — Live Assist, Power Tables, Live Boards, and App Builder stay off until an admin turns them on, because a data or code-deploying app appearing unbidden in every tenant’s launcher (and starting to bill on usage) would be hostile.

Published vs admin-only — When you first enable an app, it is not yet published to users. Admins can see and use it immediately, but end users cannot. This gives you time to configure it, load sample data, and test before rolling it out. You promote it to users in one of two ways: “Publish to everyone” makes it visible organisation-wide, or adding a visibility rule makes it visible only to the members of a specific group.

Visibility rules — A visibility rule ties an app to a notification recipient group. Only members of that group see the app. Multiple rules are additive — a user who is in any of the listed groups has access. When the last visibility rule is removed, the app falls back to its published state (either visible to everyone, or admin-only).

App Admins and Contributors — Beyond the organisation-wide Administrator role, individual users can be assigned as app-level administrators or contributors for a specific app. An app admin can configure the app (schema, settings, destructive operations). A contributor can work with records (create, edit) but never the structure. These assignments are per-app, per-business, and managed from the app’s detail page.

Categories — Apps are organised into eight categories: Scheduling, Recruiting, HR Operations, Learning & Growth, IT Services, Workplace Ops, Platform, and Productivity & Utility. The Apps list groups by category and the toolbar has a category filter chip. Custom apps (plugins) default to Productivity & Utility when no category is set.

Configuration — Most apps declare a configuration schema that drives a generic settings form at Admin → All Apps → (app) → Configure. The schema defines the fields, types (boolean, select, multi-select, integer, slider, date range, time range, and others), and defaults. Saving the form merges only the schema-declared settings into the existing configuration — settings written by the app’s own settings page are preserved.

Setup Health — The Apps list shows a badge when an enabled app has a configuration schema and every key still matches its schema default. This is a signal that the admin enabled the app but never customised it, which may mean it is not behaving as intended.

System apps vs custom apps — System apps ship with the platform and are managed by MangoApps. Custom apps (plugins) are built by your organisation or installed from the plugin marketplace. Custom apps auto-grant a licence when enabled and can be fully uninstalled (including their data). System apps cannot be deleted — only enabled or disabled.

Agent capability — Some apps are AI-integrated (they have an AI agent that can take actions), some are agent-only (they exist purely as an AI agent with no traditional UI), and some have no agent capability. The Apps list shows a badge indicating each app’s agent type, and a capability filter lets you narrow by type.

4. Running it

Enabling an app

1. Go to Admin → Apps → All Apps.
2. Find the app. Click Enable on its row or from the app’s detail page.
3. If a licence is required and not available, the error message names the bundle(s) the app belongs to.
4. On success, the app is enabled and admin-only. The confirmation message tells you how to publish it.

Disabling an app

1. Go to Admin → Apps → All Apps.
2. Find the enabled app. Click Disable from its row actions.
3. Disabling unpins the app from the sidebar and hides it from all users. The app’s configuration is preserved — re-enabling it restores the previous settings.

Publishing an app to users

1. Click the app’s name to open its detail page.
2. Open the Access management panel.
3. Click Publish to everyone to make the app visible organisation-wide, or add one or more visibility rules to target specific groups.
4. To pull an app back to admin-only, click Unpublish. The app stays enabled and admins retain access, but end users can no longer see it.

Configuring an app

1. Click the app’s name, then click Configure.
2. The form shows every setting the app declares in its schema. Change values and click Save.
3. Some apps also have a dedicated settings page inside the app itself. The app’s detail page links to it when one exists.

Managing app admins

1. On the app’s detail page, find the App Administrators section.
2. Click Add App Admin. Select a user and choose the role — Admin or Contributor.
3. To remove someone, click the remove action next to their name.

Bulk operations

The Apps list supports selecting multiple apps and then clicking Bulk Enable or Bulk Disable. Apps that require a licence your organisation does not have are silently skipped during bulk enable — the confirmation message reports how many were skipped and why.

Pinning an app to the sidebar

1. On the Apps list, toggle the pin icon on the app’s row.
2. The app icon appears in the sidebar rail for all users who have not personalised their own rail. The sidebar rail holds a maximum of 7 pinned apps. If all slots are full, unpin one first.
3. An app must be enabled before it can be pinned. Only enabled apps can be pinned.

Plugins (App Builder)

The Plugins surface at Admin → Apps → Custom Apps is a separate page for apps built with the App Builder SDK. From here you can:

1. Upload a plugin from a zip file or install one from the plugin marketplace.
2. Enable or disable a plugin for your business.
3. Deploy a new version (reloads the plugin’s code without a container restart).
4. Roll back to a previous version if a deploy causes issues.
5. Uninstall a plugin entirely — this runs the plugin’s cleanup hook, purges its per-business data, and removes the marketplace link.

Customer-created plugins skip the licence requirement — the licence is auto-granted when you enable them.

Plugins that have been shared to the plugin marketplace can be installed by other organisations from the Marketplace tab within Custom Apps.

5. Settings

Setting	Where	Default	What it changes
App enabled	Admin → All Apps → Enable/Disable	Not enabled	Whether the app is active for your organisation
Published to users	Admin → All Apps → (app) → Access management → Publish	Not published	Whether end users can see the app, or only admins
Pinned to sidebar	Admin → All Apps → pin toggle	Not pinned	Whether the app icon appears in the sidebar rail
Per-app configuration	Admin → All Apps → (app) → Configure	Schema defaults (varies per app)	App-specific behaviour defined by its configuration schema
RAG enabled	App detail page → Agent Settings	Off (shown as RAG Disabled)	Whether the app’s knowledge base is available to the AI agent

6. More help

• Apps & Licensing FAQ — specific questions about licensing, access, and troubleshooting
• Settings Hub & Navigation — finding settings and navigating the admin sidebar
• Billing & Subscription — managing your organisation’s subscription and payments
• Ask AI — the assistant answers questions about app configuration from these articles.