In-house deployment of Windows Phone 8 applications

Question

Is there something similar to the iOS Developer Enterprise Program for Windows Phone 8 apps?

Torrens

Answer 1

Yes, you can join the enterprise program by signing up for a Company account in the Windows Phone Dev Center. The process is called Company App Distribution.

In a nutshell, once your company account has been verified, you'll receive an ID that you'll provide to Symantec, who will generate an Enterprise Mobile Code Signing Certificate. You'll use this certificate to generate a token (that devices use to identify themselves with your enterprise) and to sign applications. The token and the apps can be distributed via e-mail, browser, MDM, or Company Hub.

E-mail and browser distribution are straight-forward, MDM occurs through a device management system such as Windows InTune. Company Hub is an on-device application that your organization develops for in-house application discovery, installation, and launch.

See the Windows Phone 8: Enterprise Development talk from the //Build/ conference for more information.

Nares

Answer 2

There is a feature for this explicitly added in WP8. It's called company hubs.

Expect more details to be available shortly as the SDK has only been available for a few hours and documentation is slowly being distributed/updated online.

Fort

Answer 3

This is something that I've been interested in myself, here's the official blog entry about this from Microsoft's side:

http://blogs.msdn.com/b/windowsstore/archive/2012/04/25/deploying-metro-style-apps-to-businesses.aspx

It all sounds great, but then you get to this: http://social.technet.microsoft.com/Forums/en-US/w8itproinstall/thread/3092a681-b9cc-473b-83aa-b492ea7f3946

It doesn't appear to have actually been implemented yet.

Good luck!

Baelbeer

Here's another link with more concrete information: technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/… – Baelbeer

Answer 4

It's possible to develop private WP8 apps for your company only and distribute them directly, not via Windows Phone Store.
You should start by downloading the SDK, the web documentation should be available soon.
http://www.microsoft.com/en-us/download/details.aspx?id=35471

Laminate