The Microsoft Teams Employee Ideas App: What Changed, and Where Teams Go Next

What the Employee Ideas app was

Employee Ideas was a pre-built Power Apps template that Microsoft shipped for Teams. It installed as two apps: Ideas, where employees see the campaigns that have been created, submit their own ideas and upvote other submissions, and Manage Ideas, where team owners create campaigns, view submissions and edit the form questions.

Teams owners could add it as a tab in a channel, and it ran on Dataverse for Teams. If you had someone comfortable with Power Platform, you could customise it in Power Apps Studio and extend it with Power Automate, Power BI and the rest of that toolkit. For a lot of organisations it was the free, good-enough suggestion box that lived where people already worked.

What changed

The app is no longer available in the Teams app store. That is what users are reporting, in threads with titles like "Employee Ideas App disappeared" and "Has the employee idea app been permanently removed?" on Microsoft Q&A, and in the r/MicrosoftTeams thread from a team that had used it for years and needed a replacement.

The common read in those threads is that the app had not been updated for a couple of years and Microsoft retired it quietly. There is no official like-for-like replacement that we can find as of September 2026. One detail tells the story: the replies to those threads are dominated by third-party vendors, including Sideways 6, offering their own Teams apps. When the vendor of the nearest alternative is answering your support threads, the demand is real.

We are describing what users report and what is visible in the Teams store, not an official Microsoft statement. If you need certainty for a procurement decision, ask your Microsoft account team.

Your four options now

1. Rebuild it on Power Platform

The template pattern still works: a Power App with a Dataverse or SharePoint list behind it, installed as a Teams tab. You keep everything inside Microsoft and you do not add a vendor. The catch is that you now own it. Someone has to build it, maintain it and fix it when a connector breaks. Licensing is the other catch, because Power Apps and Dataverse capacity can sit on top of your Microsoft 365 plan, so check with your reseller before you assume it is free.

2. Buy a Teams-native app

Sideways 6 is the best known, with a free tier up to 10 users and $3 per user per month up to 500 users. HYPE Boards and Ideanote also list Teams apps. This is the fastest route if your company is all-Microsoft and you want support, a roadmap and someone else to maintain it. You pay per user or by quote, and you are buying into that vendor's ecosystem.

3. Run a standalone web tool alongside Teams

Employees open a web app in a browser, you post the link in a channel, and Teams carries the conversation. This is where Harmoni sits. It works for mixed estates, for sites that are not on Microsoft 365, and for shift or field staff who will use a phone browser but will not install Teams. It also means the tool keeps working if your Microsoft estate changes.

4. Stay on Microsoft Forms and a spreadsheet

Free, instant, already deployed. We are not going to pretend it never works. The failure mode is well documented: submissions go into a sheet, nobody owns the response, and by month three employees have stopped bothering. If your only problem is capture, Forms is fine. If your problem is follow-through, it is not.

Where Harmoni fits, and where it does not

To be clear about the limits: Harmoni is a web app, not a Teams app. It cannot be embedded in a Teams tab today, because harmoniapp.com sends an X-Frame-Options: DENY header as a security measure. If having the tool inside Teams is a hard requirement for your organisation, buy a Teams-native app instead. We would rather say that now than have you find out during a rollout.

What Harmoni does give you: submission from any browser on desktop or phone, AI assistance that shapes rough notes into a usable proposal, a single manager review queue, innovation challenges, anonymous submissions, rewards and leaderboards, and reporting. If your workforce is mixed, or you simply do not want a per-user bill, that is the trade.

Setting it up alongside Teams

1. Start the 14-day free trial. No card, full access.
2. Create your workspace and invite employees by email. Every band includes all employees, so nobody has to be left off the invite list.
3. Launch your first challenge: one question, a deadline, and a category so it is easy to sort.
4. Paste the challenge link into your Teams channel, and mention it in the next team meeting. Two channels beats one.
5. Work the manager review queue and make sure every idea gets a reply. The first week sets the tone.
6. Post a short weekly digest in the channel: ideas in, ideas answered, ideas being implemented.

The setup itself takes minutes. The participation habit takes weeks, and it is the part that decides whether the scheme survives. Our features page covers what employees, managers and admins each see, and the UK suggestion scheme guide covers the policy, the HMRC reward rules and the response cadence.

How the options compare

Competitor details as listed in September 2026. The Employee Ideas app row describes how the template worked while it was available.

Harmoni pricing

Harmoni prices as listed on this site in September 2026. No setup fee, no per-seat charges, 14-day free trial with no card.