Deployment tab - Global settings

[TeriStevenson]

We are starting to deploy the Microsoft Store for Business apps in App Portal (2019 R1) and a couple of questions have come up.

Previously in older versions there was  a bug on the 

Automatically fail if Final status is not received after ..... hours.

Automatically fail if no status is received after ..... hours

if there was an empty value it was considered as NULL and the request was failed automatically.  The recommendation at that time was to set the values to 168 to avoid this.

Has this been fixed in the code?  We want to set this to a smaller number as we begin to deploy the MS Store for business apps.  In addition, our packaging team puts a wrapper on our packages so the install pops up to alert the end user that it is beginning.  This was to help users who had scheduled an install and might be in a meeting. 

With the MS Store apps where the install is directly from the store, any suggestions on how to improve the user experience since its a silent install?  We send the success and failure notifications but we are looking at a way to alert them the install is beginning.  Some ideas were to use an alert when its added to the cart and do a custom notification but that would only work if the users read the pop ups 🙂

[CharlesW · Accepted solution]

Teri - Yes, the bug to which you refer (IOJ-1817712) was fixed in 2016 (11.0.1 to be exact).  A the time, the work around was to set these values at a "local" level on the catalog items themselves. 

With regards to the second part of your question, the only thing that comes to mind is a notification and/or an alert, both of which you mentioned.. 

[jdempsey]

I haven't touched the Microsoft Store for Business.  I had several conversations with that team when I was in the ConfigMgr product group at MS, but that was before they were really a thing.  Can you clarify how this works?  Is it just an "application model" from the ConfigMgr perspective?  Is App Portal doing anything different for these deployments than it does for any other kind of application deployment?  For the notifications, I would think you could configure your deployments in ConfigMgr to show toast notifications, so if they are actively using the computer, they should at least see that pop up when the installation begins.  Could you do anything with an "On Submit for Install" event action?  Perhaps a PowerShell that does a remote execution on the client device?  That would of course require your server to have appropriate network access to client devices and your service account to have appropriate permissions for remote execution on devices.

As for the failure timers, there is nothing magical about the 168 number.  That may be the default with a new site installation (I don't recall), but you can certainly put any number you want in there.  If you only want to wait 4 hours or 24 hours, that should work fine by entering those numbers.  Keep in mind these values can be set at either a global level or on individual catalog items.  If you need to set some catalog items shorter and some longer, just update the values on the individual catalog items.  There is also another timer to "prevent false failures" that is a global setting only.  That setting tells App Portal to wait for that period of time after receiving a failure status before it takes any other action (in case it retries and succeeds on its own).

p.s.  I posted this a week ago, but for some reason, it stayed in Draft instead of posting.  Apologies for the delay.