Using Site Collection App Catalogs

When deploying Sintel Apps customers can choose from one of two methods:

• Method 1 Tenant App Catalog deployment (preferred method)
• Method 2 Site Collection App Catalog deployment

Sintel highly recommend Method 1 which involves adding Sintel Apps into your tenant app catalog.

Benefits of Tenant App Catalog deployment

1. Much easier to update in from a single location.
2. It can be updated directly from the latest version available in Microsoft AppSource.
3. Updates have been extensively tested and reviewed before being published by Microsoft.
4. Ensure that all sitesare using the same version of the app.

Drawbacks of Site Collection App Catalog deployment

1. Multiple unnecessary site collection app catalogs need to created (1 for each site collection where Sintel Apps will be used).
2. Sintel Apps has to be manually uploaded and deployed in each site collection.
3. Updating Sintel Apps becomes a lot more difficult as updates require you to manually upload the latest package into each site collection app catalog.
4. Different site could be running different versions of the app which can lead to compatibility issues or missing features or bugfixes.

The only reason to deploy the app into individual site collection app catalogs is to restrict it’s use to only those site collections. However, the ability to restrict its use in this way comes with significant administrative overhead and not worth the effort in our opinion.

If an organisation wishes to deploy the app via a site collection app catalog, this can be accomplished using the following steps.

1. Create the site collection app catalog
2. Download the latest Sintel Apps package from here:
   https://s3.eu-west-1.amazonaws.com/sintel.workspace/SintelApps/sintel-apps-production.sppkg
3. Upload the Sintel Apps package into the site collection app catalog and deploy it (when deploying if the user chooses to deploy it to all sites this will only make it available in sub sites of the current site collection)
4. Grant Sintel Apps the permissions it needs via
   https://YourTenant-admin.sharepoint.com/_layouts/15/online/AdminHome.aspx#/webApiPermissionManagement
5. Create the Sintel Apps page Home->New Page->Choose the Sintel Apps full-page template and name it “SintelApps” and save it