SharePoint Dragons

It certainly seems to be true that the tone of voice in SharePoint 2013 is pretty upbeat, not only when compared with previous versions, but in general. Already, the “working on it” feedback you get when SharePoint is busy has become something of a catch phrase amongst SharePoint devs and admins. It’s a great thing, whenever someone comes up to you and asks you’ve finished something, you can just look up and reply: working on it!

We’ve witnessed another nice example of this upbeat tone when we finished completing toe configuration of the App environment which allows end users to install SharePoint Store Apps, see http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/fp161236(v=office.15) if you want to know how to do that.

Of course, after configuring the App environment, we immediately tried to install one of the SharePoint Store Apps and this is what we got: “Everything is fine, but we had a small problem getting your license. Please go back to the SharePoint Store to get this app again and you won’t be charged for it.”

We appreciate the positivity of the message, but in fact things are not fine and this problem doesn’t get away over time. The message probably means you’re trying to add Apps using the SharePoint System Account, which we found out is not allowed by design as importing App licenses under this account could lead to performance problems (we’re wondering why?) as stated at http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/fp161231(v=office.15).aspx .

So instead, you need to use a regular user account to install Apps. It’s not as easy to sign in as a different user account as it used to be. In SharePoint 2013, the quick shortcut Sign in as Different User is missing, so one thing you can do is go to Start > click Shift + Internet Explorer and choose Run as Different User to run the browser in a different user context. We found that that’s not even enough, because now the SharePoint Store has trouble detecting language settings, so you need to actually log in as a different user. After that, adding Apps from the SharePoint Store should work fine.