Windows Store Apps as available App in Company Portal

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This week a short blogpost about a recent change in Intune and the Company Portal. In the July What’s new documentation I found the following new feature: ‘With this release, admins can now assign the Microsoft Store for Business as available. When set as available, end-users can install the app from the Company Portal app or website without being redirected to the Microsoft Store.’ It looks like a tiny small feature but it has a great user experience improvement. Before this feature a user had two software portals: In the Company Portal were the applications visible from Intune and in the Windows Store for Business were the application visible from private business store. With this change we can combine those two and make the Company Portal the one-stop-shop for software on a Windows 10 MDM managed workstation.

So let’s dive into the configuration. First we need to define our connection to the Windows Store for Business:

  1. Go to the Azure portal (https://portal.azure.com) and open the Intune section
  2. Go to Mobile Apps and click on Windows Store for Business
  3. Here you need to connect your Windows Store for Business with Intune, after connecting Intune with your Windows Store for Business you should see the following screen:

 

When the above configuration is in place we should see all of the Windows Store for Business Apps within Intune. In this scenario I want to make to Microsoft To-Do app available to my users, I already added the To-Do app to the private store and because of the connection between the Windows Store for Business and Intune the App is automatically added to Microsoft Intune. The only thing we need to do is to configure the assignment of the application within Intune:

  1. Go to the Azure portal (https://portal.azure.com) and open the Intune section
  2. Go to Mobile Apps and click on Apps
  3. Search for the Microsoft To-Do app and open the properties

  4. Click on Assignments and assign the application available to a group of users

  5. That’s it!

Now let’s finally take a look how this will look like for a user. The user will see the available store app now in his Company Portal:

When the user clicks on the app and click on install the application will be installed:

And when installed the user will see the following:

And when checking the store you will see that the application is installed from store:

And the user is able to use the store application:

So with this change the Company Portal can be the one-stop-shop for Software deployed by Intune!

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