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.

This post is article-2 from the 30 Articles App series for SharePoint.

In this post, I will discuss about how to create app domain for your on-premise server.

Those who have experienced NAPA on Office 365 Developer preview must have realized that they had the app domain created there from the URLs of the Apps.

OK so now as suppose if you own your own on-premise SharePoint farm and you would like to create and deploy Apps for your organization or you may be a developer creating an App for public Market; You will need to set up an App domain to make this happen!!

Pr-requisite to check for this task:

1. You have installed SharePoint 2013 preview correctly
2. Your PC/laptop or VM ( whichever is your on-premise server for you ) should have at least 12GB ram or 8GB +SSD will work as well. There is already enough discussion is going on about the memory requirement for development environment; these are my opinions, this is a beta and there might be more surprises to come so choose wisely.
3. Verify that the ‘SharePoint Administration‘ and ‘SharePoint Timer‘ services are running.

Just want to tell you if you try to deploy your App through Visual studio without setting up your App domain then you should get below error..!! So do not worry we will get there 🙂

if you run into some trouble in part-1 , you better check the available memory first!!

OK then let’s begin !!

Part : 1 – Creating an isolated App Domain

Run following commands on SharePoint management Power Shell:

1. At this point you should have SharePoint timer services running and a managed farm account created already!
2. Create your isolated app domain by running the SharePoint Management Shell as an administrator and typing the following command: Set-SPAppDomain “your app domain” ex. Set-SPAppDomain “AanuWizard App Domain”
3. Check that SPSubscriptionSettingsService and AppManagementServiceInstance services are running by powershell or central Admin site.
4. Now run following commands on powershell

$account = Get-SPManagedAccount "contoso\sp_farm" 

$appPoolSubSvc = New-SPServiceApplicationPool -Name SettingsServiceAppPool
 -Account $account

$appPoolAppSvc = New-SPServiceApplicationPool -Name AppServiceAppPool 
 -Account $account

$appSubSvc = New-SPSubscriptionSettingsServiceApplication 
 –ApplicationPool $appPoolSubSvc –Name SettingsServiceApp
 –DatabaseName SettingsServiceDB 

$proxySubSvc = New-SPSubscriptionSettingsServiceApplicationProxy
 –ServiceApplication $appSubSvc

$appAppSvc = New-SPAppManagementServiceApplication 
 -ApplicationPool $appPoolAppSvc -Name AppServiceApp 
 -DatabaseName AppServiceDB

$proxyAppSvc = New-SPAppManagementServiceApplicationProxy
 -ServiceApplication $appAppSvc

Set-SPAppSiteSubscriptionName -Name "AanuWizardApp" -Confirm:$false

part:2 – Create a DNS domain name

You must create a new domain name in Domain Name Services (DNS) to host the apps. To help improve security, the new domain name should not be a sub domain of the domain that hosts the SharePoint sites.

When an app is provisioned, it needs a unique DNS domain name (for example, in my case :http://app-ef2c916a38e2fe.aanuwizardapps.com). You need a wildcard Canonical Name (CNAME) entry for your DNS domain to support these unique names.

1) Open DNS from Administrative Tools

2) Create ‘ New Zone’ by right clicking the “Forward Lookup Zones”

3) you need to create a wildcard alias record for the DNS domain name that allows for individual apps to create unique domain names within your app domain.

Choose FQDN for your target host as your server domain -> same as parent; in my case it is “CONTOSO.COM”

Once finished it should look like below.

4) Change the URL settings as per your preference in Central Administration -> Apps -> Configure App URLs.

Create a Developer Site (As you can only deploy your Apps to Developer site)

Now you are through to deploy the Apps on your development server!!

References for this article :

http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/office/apps/fp179923%28v=office.15%29

http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/fp161236%28v=office.15%29.aspx