In this weeks blog I describe how to download an Appx package for offline use through the Microsoft Store for Business and Education to deploy the Appx package using Liquit Workspace as described in Application of the Week – Netflix (Part 2).
IT admins can sign up for the Microsoft Store for Business and Education here. Using Azure AD is a prerequisite and you have to have an Azure AD or Office 365 account. That’s all. Then sign in to the Store for Business and accept the Business terms.
First set ‘Show offline apps’ to ‘On’ under Settings, Shopping experience:
In the upper right part of your screen you can search for any Microsoft Store app. Select the app and click ‘Get the app’ to add it to your inventory. Make sure you set the License type to ‘Offline’ first before you click ‘Get the app’. Unfortunately not every Microsoft Store app is available for ‘Offline’ usage.
Then the selected Microsoft Store app become available under ‘Products & services’, under the ‘Apps & software’ tab at https://businessstore.microsoft.com/manage/inventory/apps-software.
Change the view from ‘Table’ to ‘Cards’ by clicking the ‘Table’ icon:
Only this view has the option ‘Download for offline use’ of selected Microsoft Store apps as described in ‘Distribute offline apps’ in the Microsoft Store for Business documentation, when you click the ellipses:
Within ‘Download package for offline use’, either you get access to an AppxBundle download or to an Appx download. After downloading an AppxBundle sometimes you have to add the file extension .AppxBundle to the filename.
An .AppxBundle contains several .Appx packages, at least one for every supported platform and architecture:
NB1. Somewhere later this year we will need to look at a different approach when Microsoft deprecates the Microsoft Store for Business. ZDnet’s Mary Jo Foley has a nice article about what will happen in the near future: ‘Microsoft is planning to phase out the Windows 10 Store for Business‘.
NB2. The method described above is the only official way of getting access to Appx packages in the Microsoft Store. And yes, before you swamp me with comments about how to do this unofficially, I know how Fiddler works 😉