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.