Beginning SharePoint 2013 Development

Chapter 8

Distributing SharePoint 2013 Apps

WHAT YOU WILL LEARN IN THIS CHAPTER:

• Distributing apps via the SharePoint Store
• Licensing and managing apps in the Store

WROX.COM CODE DOWNLOADS FOR THIS CHAPTER

The wrox.com code downloads for this chapter are found at: http://www.wrox.com/WileyCDA/WroxTitle/productCd-1118495845.html on the Download Code tab. The code for this chapter is divided into the following major examples:

• SharePointAppPackage.app

So you have built the next million-dollar idea into a SharePoint app and you want to make sure the world buys it. The SharePoint Store is a good starting point for making sure the largest number of people sees your app. But how do you take your app and distribute it through the SharePoint Store? What are your licensing options? How can you manage your apps after they are out in the wild being used by millions of happy users? This chapter provides guidance and answers for these questions.

Over the past five years, the app phenomenon has taken the world by storm. The concept of an app isn’t new — it has been around for decades, ever since the first personal computer. What makes the app concept so popular today is the ease of finding and buying low-cost and (mostly) high-value apps easily and quickly. Today that concept centers mostly on smartphones; however, ecosystems are quickly developing around other types of computing, such as social computing and gaming. Although they are not the first to the game enterprise, software vendors ...