Sharepoint Online App Store

Brass Contributor

We are just getting into Sharepoint Online, and I have a couple questions about the App Store.

 

So a site owner asked us why the Discussion Board isn't available now that her site has been moved online.  We looked and sure enough MS deprecated that one (for some unknown reason).  So for the first time I really looked through the App Store and found one that I thought might work.  The funny thing is that there is no indication whatsoever about the cost of this app.

 

Not knowing what would happen I clicked on the Request link.  A few minutes later I, (and the other SP/Tentant admins got an email asking us to approve or deny the request.  Oddly enough there is still no indication whatsoever about the cost of this app.

 

I went out and googled this app and found it's company website, where it says it's $1,000 for 50 users, and any enterprise with more than 10,000 users should contact them for more pricing.  But all of that looks like it applies to SP on prem.  Nothing says anything about the cloud pricing.

 

So if I, (or any of the other admins), click the Approve button, I assume this app will be placed in our organizations App Catalog.  From that point forward any Site Owner will see this listed as an approved app that they can add to their site.

 

What happens at that point?  Does it pop up and say "Contact the vendor for a license"?  Or does it just bill your MS account for whatever the cost of the app is?

 

We have been discussing this, and I can't see every clicking the Approve button without knowing exactly what the bill will be in advance.  There is NO WAY I'm adding apps to the organizations App Catalog without knowing the costs up front.

 

Am I missing something about this?  Or is there some other way to find out what the costs of these apps will be?  I know from googling that some apps say that they are free, but when you add them to the app catalog and try to use them it asks for licensing info.  So much for free.

 

We've been debating this, and doubt we want to pay $1,000 for 50 users to have access to a Discussion board app.  I assume MS would be getting a cut of that money, which is probably the reason MS decided to not make a discussion board app for Sharepoint Online.

 

Also, is there any way to completely hide the Sharepoint Store?  If we decide that we aren't going to allow any apps from the Store, I don't want to be having to deal with a ton of requests that I'm going to have to deny all of them.

3 Replies
Just guessing here, but perhaps MS no longer wants to support a discussion board app when it has other products that could stand in for one. Perhaps a Yammer group would be helpful to the site owner who is missing a discussion board.

@LindaN the discussion board hasn't been updated for many many years and doesn'r work with the modern experience. So I think you are right that Microsoft are nudging people to Yammer.

 

Rob
Los Gallardos
Intranet, SharePoint and Power Platform Manager (and classic 1967 Morris Traveller driver)

Good point. I should have mentioned that the reason the discussion board came up was that the company decided to not use Yammer. Management didn't care for it, and told the business that no, we weren't going to install Yammer any day soon.