This post is part of the New Functionality In Microsoft Dynamics 365 Business Central 2024 Wave 1 series in which I am taking a look at the new functionality introduced in Microsoft Dynamics 365 Business Central 2024 Wave 1.
The 11th of the new functionality in the Governance and administration section is experience the new embedded AppSource marketplace page.
Microsoft AppSource is an online store that contains thousands of business applications and services built by industry-leading software providers. It’s a platform that makes it easy for customers to discover and try new apps, get customer leads, and gain usage insights for trials, deployments, and growth for customer accounts. In addition to the primary AppSource marketplace site, Business Central has had an embedded AppSource experience inside the client, used to browse and install apps directly from within the client. Since this option has been deprecated, Microsoft have built a new replacement Microsoft AppSource Apps page in the client..
Enabled for: Users, automatically
Public Preview: Apr 1, 2024
General Availability: Apr 1, 2024
Feature Details
The old embedded AppSource experience has been deprecated by the AppSource team, and replaced with APIs enabling custom experiences inside consuming products. Given its widespread use in Business Central, to browse and install apps, Microsoft have replaced the old embed experience with a new Microsoft AppSource Apps page.
From this page, you can view, sort, and filter available AppSource apps by name, publisher name, install state, popularity, average rating, number of ratings, and last modified date.
You can select a given app and see the details for that app.
You’ll also find the following actions:
- View AppSource to open the online AppSource marketplace in a browser.
- View in AppSource to open and view a selected app in the online AppSource Marketplace.
- Refresh list from Microsoft AppSource to force a refresh of the list of all apps to AppSource marketplace content—for example, if you’re looking for a newly submitted AppSource app.
As with other list pages, you get support for Analysis Mode—for example, so that you can group apps by publisher.
You can even use Copilot to create the Analysis Mode view for you.
My Opinion
The old app source wasn’t the greatest experience, but that was more about the apps submitted to it, whereby quite a few are listed but only available to the direct customers of the vendor who added the app. I doubt this has changed, so I’m not sure how much of an improvement this “new coat of paint” will be; the other issue, which again this won’t fix, is how unresponsive some vendors are to enquiries about their app.
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