The App Catalog - SharePoint Online Tutorial

- [Instructor] The best way of controlling what apps are available to your SharePoint users is by use of the App Catalog. The App Catalog gives you a central place to store and deploy apps so that they appear as from your organization and recommended apps on individual site app pages. The first step is to create the App catalog. Now from the Apps page, using the classic features, very first link, App Catalog. If you don't have an App Catalog already, you will be prompted to create one. And creating one, we just walk through the normal steps of quickly creating a new collection. So App Catalog, and it'll be a site, and we'll call it App Catalog, because that will be very clear, English, the Administrator, George, and click Okay. After you've created the site, you want to go back to active sites. And it may take 15 to 20 minutes for the new App Catalog site to become available. But when it shows up, go ahead and just click on that. And then, click on the URL to go directly to the site itself. Now the App Catalog, is a separate site, designed specifically for managing apps. And you'll notice that one of the choices in the promoted links is to manage apps for O365, for Office, you can do that here, but we'll consider that out of scope for now. You will also want to have a discussion with your O365 admin before you do anything with O365 apps. For right now, we want to click distribute apps for SharePoint, right there. This library here is where authorized apps are loaded for sharing. But this is a little strange. If you want your apps to show as apps from your organization, you have to add them to this library. But this requires having the app file. If you've got developers creating custom apps for your organization, this is easy. But not all third party app developers make their app files available for download. You kind of have to check every app individually to see if there's a link to the app file. Because of this, I'm recommending that you don't add apps here, unless they're your own custom apps or the app developer requires you to add them this way. Some do, and they're the ones who generally provide those download files. There's another way I'll show you that's simpler. But let's walk through this quickly, in case you ever need it. Start by clicking New. And we'll want to browse to the app file. Pardon my complicated stuff here. There we go, that's an app file right there. Click Open. Say Okay. And this will add it directly to the app library. Okay, so our app is added and now let's go in and click on Properties. Now there's a few different things that you can do here, there's some options that you have. My recommendation generally is that you leave them alone. My experience is that you can get some unexpected results if you change defaults. The only things that you're really concerned about right now, as far as I'm concerned, are these two options right at the bottom. Enabled and Featured. Select both of these to have the app available for users and displayed in the featured section of the Add App page in their sites. Click Save and you're done. Now what do you do if you don't have an app file? Well, this is easy. In the App Catalog site, click the gear icon and click Add an App, and then go to the SharePoint store. You can now select from hundreds of different apps, which you can filter by category. You can also select just to see the free apps. Free is good, but warning, many of these are only free for a trial period, after that, there will be a fee to use them. But let's go ahead and pick this one. 'k, and here, all you need to do is click Add It. And then we will continue here. And finally, we want to make sure this check box, Add this to the App Catalog is clicked. And we'll return to site. Actually, there's one more step. We need to say that we trust this app. I will talk a little more about trust in a bit, but for now, I'm just going to go ahead and accept that. The app is now on the App Catalog's site contents page. Now this might take a few minutes for the app to load in all the way, but we can see this app is now here. Now how does this show up for the users? So here's a site within the tenant. Let's go to the Add an app page, here. You can see that the app that we just added is now listed as an app that can be added to the site. Also the other one, the first one that we added to the App Catalog library. Now from your organization, we're only seeing that one that we added as a file. But at least both of the apps are still available to the users. Which is the important part.