Install and configure the Application Catalog roles

- When you install Configuration Manager Client on a Windows device as we see here on Client1 and Client2, it automatically installs the Software Center as well. The new Software Center has a modern look. Let's take a look at that on Client1. We're on Client1 and if you would like to open up the Software Center, you can go ahead and just type on the search bar 'Software Center' and there is a desktop app that will show up. I've gone ahead and launched it so here is the new Software Center.

We see lots of different things going on here, we see the options, device compliance, and we can just click on check compliance just to make sure that the computer is operating properly with System Center. And it looks good. We have installation status, of course we haven't installed anything yet. We have operating systems, updates, and applications. So there'll be things that we are going to add going forward that will show up in our Software Center. Let's go back to System Center configuration manager. We're back in our configuration manager and what we're going to do now is we're going to install the application catalog web service point and the application catalog website roles in our same PDX site.

We don't have to install them on the same server or in the same active directory forest. However the application catalog web service point must be in the same forest as the site database. Let's go down to administration. And from here we'll go to site configuration and servers and site system roles. And we can see all the different roles for our SCCM server. Let's go ahead and right-click on our server and choose to add a site system roles. Let's go ahead and leave the defaults and click next.

Until we get to our application catalog roles. Prior to this we just took a look at the Software Center on a Windows X client. What we're doing now is we're installing these web service roles for the application catalog so that way we can install applications that we can add later on and access them through a website rather than through the Software Center. The advantage to this is that those users who are working outside of our domain and forest, possibly connecting through the internet, will be able to just go to a website to install the applications they need.

So go ahead and click next. I'm going to be choosing the defaults here but if you're going to allow users to access from the internet you're going to want to choose HTTPS instead of HTTP. That will require you also set up a certificate as well. So go ahead and click next. Once again we're going to default the HTTP Port 80 connection. You can type in a name for your organization. And a website theme. Next, and we were successful, go ahead and click close.

This installation assumed that you had already installed IIS on your server. If you get an error when you run through this wizard it's possible that you forgot to do that particular prerequisite. So go ahead and go to the server manager and add that role and then come back and try to add these site systems roles once again. Now we'll take a look at the website and make sure our catalog appears. We're in Internet Explorer and this also works in Edge. You have to use a Microsoft Silverlight-enabled web browser in order to be able to access this new website.

Let's go ahead and type in the name of our server followed by the URL that you see here. And we get prompted for a user name and password. So we'll just put in our domain credentials. But you can also put in a user credential as well. And here we see our application catalog. And once again we don't have anything in it as of yet. In upcoming videos we will be adding applications. You can also go to Application Requests and you can go to My Devices as well.

My Devices has the mobile device option where you can see any mobile devices that may be registered in SCCM and can show up here. The application catalog roles can add web functionality for adding applications for internet users to be able to download software available through Systems Center configuration manager.