Article 3 from 30 : How to get an App from Office Store for on-premise SharePoint 2013 environment

30 Articles App Series, Apps, SharePoint 2013 2 Minutes

This post is article-3 from the 30 Articles App series for SharePoint.

Getting the clouds down right into your business

This was the title I was going to give to this article but for sake of Search engine *discipline* I have not 😀

In this post, I will discuss about how we can connect to the Office store from our on-premise SharePoint 2013 Environment and get some Apps.

There are two reasons to pick this topic :

1 )  I want you all to experience the office store and some of the free apps there. 😀
This will give a boost in our mission for this series and a little bit of idea what can we develop as an App for SharePoint 2013.

2 )   I see there are many sharepointers who have not yet experienced this and some of them still have trouble getting this working for on-premise environment.

At the end of this article you should be able to download and install some Apps from the SharePoint / Office store.

Step – 1 :

Any prerequisite for this article ?? yes ,  Article-2: Behind the scene : Configure App Domain for on-premise SharePoint 2013 development environment

No you can’t skip this,  Go back if you have not finished yet !!

Step – 2 :

Check that below services are started and running

Go to Central Administration ->  Manage Services on this server

1) App Management Service.  2) Secure Store Service

Go to Central Administration -> Manage Service Application

App Subscription service

Step – 3 : 

Creating App Catalog site collection.

The App Catalog site is a special site collection which is scoped to web application. All apps that you want to make available for a web application have to be in the App Catalog site collection for that web application.

Go to Central Administration -> Apps -> App management -> Manage App Catalog

Step – 4 :

Connecting to Office App Store finally

Go to App Catalog -> right corner ‘Settings’-> Add an App

Select SharePoint Store from Left Navigation [ This will take you to the Microsoft’ official Office store. ]

If you are getting below error then choose language and currency.

Again error !! All the apps are disabled this time with the message contact your administrator…!!

You need to log-in with valid Microsoft account (new name for live ID ) !! Ok now we are ready to explore the App store!! 🙂

Question of the article : Can we use the existing App Catalog for more than one web application ? If yes, are there any limitations or drawback for doing it ? If you figure out the answer or you have an opinion please share in comments.

I leave you now, have some fun with the App Store till we meet again for the next Article (4) 🙂

Note: This article is written for SharePoint 2013 preview.

Published by aanuwizard

Published

6 thoughts on “Article 3 from 30 : How to get an App from Office Store for on-premise SharePoint 2013 environment”

  1. Hi,
    great articles!

    But unfortunately I have an issue getting apps from the SharePoint store to work…

    I set up a test server with SharePoint 2013, created a seperate domain for the apps (appsdevnet.local), followed your instructions to set the app prefix, etc. and downloaded an app from the SharePoint store.

    When I try to open the app, I get a “This page can’t be displayed” error.

    In the ULS log I can see the redirection URL (starts with http://app-116d1c8c69e2d0.appsdevnet.local/sites/apps/My FAQ List/Pages/Default.aspx).
    I can ping app-116d1c8c69e2d0.appsdevnet.local, but it goes to IP of my AD-server, is that correct???

    Do you have an idea what I’m missing?

    Thanks a lot!

  2. Hi again 🙂

    I found my error – in case someone else has the same difficulties:

    1. the dns CNAME record was wrong – pointed to just domain name, not the SharePoint server (devnet.local instead of .devnet.local

    2. The web site I created used host-headers. I removed them. In case you need to go with host-headers (in a production environment for example), take a look at http://sharepointchick.com/archive/2012/07/29/setting-up-your-app-domain-for-sharepoint-2013.aspx. At the bottom the host header issue and how to deal with it is explained.

    However: thanks for this article series – it’s very helpful!

  3. Hi,
    nice article!

    I found it searching for my problem with the greyed out apps from the sharepoint/office store.
    I managed to enable apps for my SharePoint and i’ve deployed a hello world sample from Visual Studio. But What i can’t manage is to insert an app from the sharepoint/office store to my sharePoint. It simply shows the “You can’t add this app here” message.

    I’ve read that your solution is to “log-in with valid Microsoft account” what do you mean with that? I can only log-in to my sharepoint using domain accounts…do I miss something?

    Thanks in advance

    Miquel

  4. Miquel,

    “log-in with valid Microsoft account” means you need to log-in with outlook or some-sort of live id account to access the Microsoft Office store.

    -Aanu

  5. Hi Aanu
    I did all configuration as mention in the last blog. but as you mentioned in step 2 above. I can’t see the following at all
    IN Central Administration -> Manage Service Application
    App Subscription service
    Can you suggest how to create/enable this service.
    Thanks for this wonderful blog and knowledge sharing.
    Imran

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