MicrosoftJoe_Lurie thanks so much for your time. I appreciate your insistence on your comments, however, in reality does not line up.
We invested in Windows 11 in our education labs and rolled it out (End of 2021). We used the private store integrated with MEM as a key area for app delivery. Approx 3 months after rollout all Apps stopped deploying and updating. At this time we noticed that the app store was blocked to all users.
We had configured our system to use private store only as in education, to make the public store visible is inappropriate. This configuration was fantastic from MS as it allowed store apps to be installed and would in turn update.
After MS blocked private store in Windows 11 (March 2022) we found that there was a change in the OS that no longer supported private store only. We discovered that when configured to be private store only, that an effect that was cascading was that all functions of the MS Store were blocked too. We've had escalations to MS Partners and engineers working on this now for 3 months to discover this cascading effect. So to get back to allowing MS Apps to be deployed and updated we needed to allow the MS Store entirely. Thus in doing so our app deployment and updates started flowing again. Engineers even looked at configurations that would allow install/update "Allow apps from the Microsoft app store to auto update" however engineers found that with the store app then disabled, would result in the same behaviour. That is blocked deployments and failures to update.
This is why we are having to download APPX packages separately and upload them into MEM. The biggest difficulty we have is with Microsoft Apps that are only accessible in the store. We never find out or know when MS update them. Since we cannot deploy straight from the store.
If we were to rollback our devices to Windows 10, I can see that everything you say (And that we do to date) would continue. However, I fear there are some unexpected issues with Windows 11 that changed in March 2022.
This is why we've had to approach the matter as I've described. I would delight to follow your advice, I really would. Talk about making life easier. However, it's simply not working as described.
I'd be happy to collaborate and show you in person if you'd find that helpful. We've had engineers from all over investigating since march and has sunk some serious hours confirming and realising that the change to Windows 11 in March 2022 was in fact responsible for the unexpected behaviour.
