Sharepoint 2013 : Packaging and distributing apps (part 3) - Publishing apps

To publish an app to the public Office Store, the developer must first create a dashboard seller account. You can create this type of account by navigating to https://sellerdashboard.microsoft.com in the browser and logging on with a valid Windows Account. Once you have logged on, you can create a new dashboard seller account that is either an individual account or a company account.

A very appealing aspect of publishing apps to the Office Store with a dashboard seller account is that it provides assistance with the management of licensing as well as collecting money from customers through credit card transactions. When you create a dashboard seller account, you are able to create a second payout account from which you supply Microsoft with the necessary details so when it collects money from customers purchasing your apps, it can transfer the funds you have earned to either a bank account or a PayPal account.

Once you have gone through the process of creating a dashboard seller account, it takes a day or two for this new account to be approved. Once your account has been approved, you can then begin to publish your apps in the Office Store. The Office Store supports publishing three types of apps: you can publish SharePoint apps, Apps for Office, and Windows Azure Catalog Apps.

You publish a SharePoint app by uploading its app package file and filling in the details associated with the app. For example, the publishing process for the Office Store requires you to provide a title, version number, description, category, logo, and at least one screenshot that shows potential customers what your app looks like.

When you publish a SharePoint app, you can also indicate via the seller dashboard whether your app is free or must be purchased. If you publish an app for purchase, you can specify the licensing fee for each user or for a given number of users. There is even an option to configure a free trial period for an app that has an associated licensing fee.

Once you have uploaded an app and provided the required information, the app must then go through an approval process. The approval process involves checking the app package to ensure that it only contains valid resources. There are also checks to validate that the app meets the minimum requirements of the user experience guidelines. For example, there is a check to ensure that the start page for the app contains the required link back to the host web.

Once the app has been approved, it is then ready for use and added to the public Office Store where it can be discovered and installed by SharePoint users.

What should you do if you want to publish an app but you don’t want to publish it to the Office Store? For example, imagine a scenario in which you don’t want to make an app available to the general public. Instead, you want to publish the app to make it available to a smaller audience such as a handful of companies that are willing to pay you for your development effort. The answer is to publish the app to an app catalog site.

An app catalog site contains a special type of document library that is used to upload and store app package files. Along with storing the app package file, this document library also tracks various types of metadata for each app. Some of this metadata is required, whereas other metadata is optional.

In the Office 365 environment, the app catalog site is automatically added when a tenancy is created for a new customer. However, this is not the case in an on-premises farm. Instead, you must explicitly create the app catalog site by using the Central Administration site or by using Windows PowerShell. Furthermore, the app catalog is created at web application scope, so you must create a separate app catalog site for each web application.

You must have farm administrator permissions within an on-premises farm to create an app catalog site. You begin by navigating to the home page of Central Administration. On the home page, there is a top-level link for Apps. When you click the Apps link, you will be redirected to a page with a group of links under the heading of App Management. Within this group of links, locate and click the link titled Manage App Catalog.

The first time you click the Manage App Catalog link, you are redirected to the Create App Catalog page, which you can use to create a new app catalog site, as shown in Figure 4. Note that the app catalog site must be created as a top-level site within a new site collection. On the Create App Catalog page, you can select the target web app that will host the new app catalog site.

Figure 4. The app catalog can be created through Central Administration within a specific web app of your choice.

Note that you can also use the Create App Catalog page to configure user access permissions to the app catalog site. Remember that providing users with access to the app catalog site is what makes it possible for them to discover and install apps of their own. You must provide read access to users if you want them to have the ability to discover apps and install them at site scope. However, you might decide against configuring user access to the app catalog site if you plan on installing apps at tenancy scope.

Once you have created the app catalog site within an on-premises farm, you should navigate to it and inspect what’s inside. You will find that there is a document library with a title of Apps for SharePoint which is used to publish SharePoint apps. There is a second document library with a title of Apps for Office that is used to publish apps created for Office applications such as Word and Excel.

You publish a SharePoint app by uploading its app package to the Apps for SharePoint document library. The SharePoint host environment is able to automatically fill in some of the required app metadata such as the Title, Version, and Product ID by reading the app manifest as the app package is uploaded. However, there is additional metadata that must be filled in by hand or by some other means. A view of apps that have been published in the Apps for SharePoint document library is presented in Figure 5.

Figure 5. The Apps for SharePoint document library contains app package files and associated metadata for published apps.

You will also notice that the app catalog site supports the management of app requests from users. The idea being that a user within a site can request an app from the Office Store. The app catalog administrator can see this request and decide whether to purchase the app or not. If the app request seems appropriate, the app catalog administrator can purchase the app and make it available for site-scope installation. Alternatively, the app catalog administrator can make the app available to the requester by using a tenancy-scoped installation.