Business Central AppSource - Downloading Apps for End Users and Partners

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Hello everyone, this is Ben over at ERP Connect, and in this video, I'm going to show you some of the new changes that have been made in version 25 when it comes to AppSource for Microsoft Dynamics 365 Business Central. If you're still on version 24, I will link a video in the top right here that will show you the old way of doing things, which in my opinion was a little bit more user-friendly, especially for all the partners and admins out there. But today, we're going to deal with the hand that we are dealt and show you how to do things in v25 as well as moving forward. I should also mention that the first half of this video will focus on a day in the life of an end user, which also has changed a little bit. Previously, whether you're an end user or a partner logging in with GAP, which stands for Granular Delegated Admin Privileges, this did not matter. However, that is no longer the case, and in the second half of this video, we are going to focus on a day in the life of the delegated admin. So without further ado, let's go over to Business Central and get started. As I mentioned, we will look at this first from the lens of an end user. For all you end users out there, you can come into Business Central as you normally would. Come up to the search and search for extension management. This will take you to the installed extensions list that you probably recognize from some of the previous versions to see what you have installed. This is still a great place to start. From here, you can see which apps are Global apps-think of AppSource downloads for the globals-versus PTE apps-think of those as custom devs from your internal team or from your partner. Now, if you're ready to grab a new app from AppSource, like our free Health Check app as an example, you would come up to what is now known as the AppSource Gallery. This AppSource Gallery will give you a list alphabetically of every app that is now in AppSource. So instead of directly launching AppSource like you used to do, you will now launch this page. Here, you can search for the app in question. In this case, I will search for our Health Check app. Looks like there are a few options, so I'm going to look at which ones have the most views and the highest ratings, and I'm going to go ahead and click on this. Here, from here, this is going to take you to another overview screen. At this point, I can view more details in AppSource, which I will do so by clicking this button right here. This will open up a screen that you probably already know and love, and it's going to give you all of the details, documentation, videos, and show all the reviews folks have left on this application. For some reason, both of these buttons currently take you out to AppSource. So if I come in here and go to install from AppSource, it will actually already do the same thing there. In this case, I can now click get it now. That would be the case if it's a free app; it'll say free trial if it's a paid app. In this case, we're just going to go ahead and click on this and start the download. If it says contact me, you will need to contact the publisher in order to gain access to that application. So at this point, we click get it now. This is going to take you through the process you may have seen in the past. It's going to ask you which environment you want to download into. I'm going to select version 25 sandbox in this case, click install, and now you are off to the races. So let's go ahead and click install here, and it should spin here for a little bit and then download. But that is basically the full end-to-end process when finding and downloading applications from Business Central. You can always come out directly to AppSource if you want the old search experience. So I can come out here. In order to do that, you can click download directly from AppSource. It will start to download into your environment directly, but if you are in Business Central, you'll need to do it the way that I showed. So if I come back here, we'll just give it a few seconds, and then we'll be able to see that our app is installed and ready to use, which will be some great news for us. For any end users out there, this is where the journey ends. For partners, we are just getting started, and after this downloads, I will show you how to do that in another environment. Here, all right, so our app is installed and ready to use. Like I said, at this point, from an end user experience, you click okay. There might be some additional permissions that you have to set up and additional setups for the ISV, depending on which it is. But at this point, the app has now been successfully downloaded from AppSource. So at this point, let's jump over to the partner's perspective. All right, so I'm going to hop over to an environment that I don't own, but I am a delegated admin in, and I'm going to try those same steps. Right, so I'm already in extension management. Let's go to that AppSource Gallery. Let's search for that Health Check again here, and here it is. We're going to click this. We are going to install it from AppSource, and if I click get it now, it's going to think for a second. But we notice that all of the environments here are the same environments that we had before. That's because it's trying to download into my Erp Connect environment rather than the client's environment. This is one of the biggest changes that you'll see, especially as a partner going forward. This is because the new AppSource experience in BC was completely rewritten, and the old embedded AppSource experience was deprecated by the AppSource team, which is different than the BC team over at Microsoft, and it's not using the standard APIs like it used to. So at the moment, GDAP cannot install apps due to the limits in the APIs, but have no fear, a workaround is here. While I know a workaround is not what everyone wants to hear necessarily, it is what we have available to us right now. So let's go ahead and get into it. So I'm going to click out of here, and I will paste this in the video's description. But what you'll want to do first is copy and paste the following URL into your browser. So let's go ahead and copy this all the way through to the 2503, and we'll take that and we will paste it into our browser here. Also, big shout out to David Keno over at Endeavor Solutions for showing me some of these tips and tricks. Shortly after expressing some of my frustrations on LinkedIn, he gave me a quick call, and one of the main reasons that I love Business Central and the community here is that everyone always seems to be willing to help. So again, thank you, David, for walking through this together today. But let's jump into it. So we're going to want to copy that URL here, and I'm going to replace two things. As we can see in the Word document here, the tenant and the app ID are the two things I'm going to need to replace in order to download this directly. To find that ID, typically it's going to be right here in your URL. This is one place that you can find it. Another place is in Admin Center. So again, it's going to be in your URL up here, and I'm going to simply come in and change the tenant here to what we just saw in that link. The app ID, that one's a little bit more tricky. So let's come over here and let's go to Health Check, and the app ID is going to be right after this period, the E through the BA. So any app that you go on, you can find the app ID up here in the URL. Again, we're getting heavy into the workaround here, but let's go ahead and take the app ID here and plug it in and click enter. Now, you will notice there's probably some spaces up in the URL. Make sure you leave those spaces. I made the mistake of taking those spaces out the first time. I know it looks weird having spaces in your URL, but literally only update the highlighted areas that I showed you. Do not update those spaces; leave those in. But what do you see now? We went from the eight environments that we saw before, and now we only see the four. We're in the client's environment now, right? And I can select the sandbox and click install. The beautiful thing about this is that it's now going to install it directly into my environment versus what we saw before of constantly trying to install it to the Erp Connect environment. It's going directly into the client's environment. So let's click install, and it'll spin like it does before. At this point here on out, it's going to work just like it used to. So we've got the information, we plug in the URL, we click enter, it's going to go through all the prompts, which environment do you want to go into, and you know what happens now. It's now going to download into the client's environment that we have listed instead of your own. Pure magic that we're seeing through that workaround. After this has been completed, you should be good to go on with your day, be able to download apps into your client's environment even if you're logging in as a partner without a paid license on that client's domain. So we'll give this another second to download the Health Check. Again, you need to add any permissions or anything else the ISV has mentioned to you after downloading these apps. But really appreciate everybody coming to join today and check this out. Our app is now installed and ready to use. For more information on how you can optimize Business Central through our suite of 30+ Applications please feel free to check out our website and do not forget to subscribe to our KZbin channel here to stay up to date with all of our latest updates and we look forward to working with everybody soon.