Danny serves as Vice President of Client Development at ThreeWill. His primary responsibilities are to make sure that we are building partnerships with the right clients and getting out the message about how we can help clients.
I’m working with Eric Bowden on getting an integration (called Trove) between Salesforce and Microsoft 365 in place. Basically, we are helping Salesforce users store their documents for Opportunities and Account in a document library in Microsoft 365. Sounds pretty basic (and pretty high value). Yes, I want this for my own – but so would everyone else who uses the world’s leading CRM with the world’s leading productivity platform.
What’s different about our Office App is it’s in place primarily for security reasons and to make the maintenance and set up much more straightforward. This may (and probably will) change in the future when we find out from initial adopters about features they would want on the Microsoft 365 side of things.
Ok, enough about that. Here are some links to get you started:
- Publish Office and SharePoint Add-ins and Microsoft 365 web apps – https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/office/jj220037.aspx?f=255&MSPPError=-2147217396
- Upload Office and SharePoint Add-ins and Microsoft 365 web apps to the Office Store – https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/office/dn708487.aspx
Getting Started
Here’s a link to the Seller Dashboard – http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?LinkId=248605 Sign in with your Microsoft account and bookmark the site. Trust me on this one.
Creating a Seller Account and Payout Information
Even though Trove is a free app, we still needed to fill out info on us as a seller and where to send the check (when we do create a paid-for app). You’ll first create a marketing profile that includes your company name, your logo, and a brief description of your company. As part of this process, you’ll also need to provide a reference of someone inside your company. Give the person a heads up (I used Tommy) so they can keep an eye out for the email. It comes pretty quickly.
You’ll need to talk to the folks in Finance to get the right info on your bank account or PayPal account for payout. You’ll also need your Tax ID, if you don’t know that already. If you don’t have all this information handy, you can save the information and submit it later on when complete.
Creating Client IDs and Secrets
Ok, this is where I really leaned on Eric Bowden. We started by creating a Client ID – you need to do this if you are a provider hosted app or a connector (we are the latter). The important field for us was the length that the client secret is valid for – we wanted this to be as long as possible so we selected three years. Another tip is that the App Redirect URL must be https:// and refer to a specific page in your app built for OAuth authentication. After clicking GENERATE CLIENT ID, I copied all the info and stored in a secure place and shared with Eric. This will be the only time you will see the client secret – so make sure you put it someplace safe that you can come back to.
Submitting the SharePoint Add-in
There’s a checklist here. Here are some pointers. You want to make sure the version exactly matches the version number in the add-in manifest file. We tested this out and this really does matter. For our SharePoint Add-In, we needed a 96 by 96 version of the Trove logo. My Photoshop skills include resizing images, so I had this covered. I had Eric send me the app file (he has the easy parts) and I used the Client ID that I just created. There is a section for Testing notes – here is where you want to include any special instructions for testing the app. Since our app has two parts – one part in the AppExchange and the other in the Office Store—we needed to provide info on logging into a Test environment for Salesforce along with a Test environment for Office. Finish up with providing a short and long description with some screenshots. I don’t have more to add about the other fields.
The Fun Part – Getting Approval
The app first goes through a scan and then the testing begins. We were pleasantly surprised with how quickly the process happened and the level of detail in the testing feedback. I’m hoping that Eric will write a post on what this is – hopefully this will be a blog post we put out later today or this week.
Posting Updates to Apps
One last tip – you want to make sure you specify the correct Client ID that you created for this version of the app. I had Eric look over my shoulder when doing this.
Do You Have Any Pointers to Add?
Leave your pointers in the comments below. Of course, if you want some help to get your app into either the Office App Store or the AppExchange please reach out to us. Or maybe you have an app like ours and want build something that goes into both stores-we’d love to hear from you.
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