IT personnel can centrally manage the
Apps for Office they want to make available to the enterprise via a
special storage location for manifest files on SharePoint.
This
exercise shows where to manage these files in Office 365 SharePoint
Online and how to configure the Office clients to look to this location
for Apps for Office. To do so, follow these steps:
2. On the
Office 365 Preview admin center page, click the Service Settings link,
then the Sites link, and the link under “Don’t see what you are looking
for?”
3. On the
SharePoint Administration Center page, click the Apps link, and then
click the App Catalog link on the right side of the page.
4. Click the Apps for Office link to display the manifest storage location.
5. Copy the URL in the browser’s address bar.
6. In the center of the Apps for Office page, click the new item link.
7. Browse to the AppManifests folder on your local machine, (the one you created in the first Try It Out), select the FirstApp.xml file, click Open, click OK to upload it, and click Save.
8. Open either
Word or Excel and log in to the Office client using your Office 365
developer tenancy username and password. The login to the Office client
is in the upper-right corner of the client application. When prompted,
choose the Organization or School option and enter your Office 365
credentials.
9. Set the Trusted
Catalog Locations, except this time, paste in the URL you copied.
10. Before clicking the Add Catalog button, trim back the URL by removing everything from _layouts/... forward through the end of the URL. Your final URL should look something like https://[YourDeveloperTenancyDomain].sharepoint.com/sites/OSPAppCat/. Click the Add Catalog button.
11. Click the
check box beside the newly added item so it will show up in the menu,
and then click OK. Close and reopen the Office client so your change
takes effect.
12. Return to
your browser Apps for Office page. Click the new item icon, click
Browse to find the manifest file you created in the first exercise, and
upload it.
13. In the
Office client you restarted, from the Insert menu, select Apps for
Office ⇒ See All, and click My Organization. You might need to click
the Refresh icon. Choose My First App and Insert it.
The Apps for Office location on
SharePoint is a custom document library specifically for storing
manifest files. After an app for Office is built by either enterprise
developers or purchased from a software vendor, the manifest file for
the app for Office is given to IT. IT can then upload the manifest file
to this SharePoint location and the app is then discoverable by any
Office users when they browse the My Organization catalog from the
client UI. Also, from this central location, IT can choose to revoke a
manifest at any time, giving them complete control over what internally
available Apps for Office end users have access to on the desktop.
