The Microsoft Store for Business and Education won’t ship on Windows 11 and will reach EOL in 2023
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Microsoft announced yesterday an important update for its Microsoft Store for Business and Education, which currently allows organizations to distribute the apps they want in their own private store on Windows 10 PCs. First of all, the Microsoft Store for Business and Education will be retired in the first quarter of 2023, confirming what previous reports have been suggesting since last year.
The writing was already on the wall earlier this year when Microsoft warned organizations that paid apps would no longer be available for acquisition on the Microsoft Store for Business and Education starting on April 14. Now, organizations currently using the Store to distribute private line-of-business apps will also need to migrate them to their local private app repository before the retirement of the Microsoft Store for Business in Q1 2023.
Windows 11, the next version of Windows that will ship this holiday season also won’t support the Microsoft Store for Business and Education. “However, admins can still leverage the connection to Store for Business and Education, from their UEM solution to deploy apps to managed Windows 11 devices, until they are retired in 2023,” the company said yesterday.
The original purpose of the Microsoft Store for Business and Education was to give organizations a secure way to distribute select apps from a single location. However, Microsoft announced last year at Build 2020 the Windows Package Manager, a new tool for managing and deploying apps to Windows 10 PCs, with Windows 11 support coming soon.
The Windows Package Manager will add a new integration with Microsoft Intune next year, which will allow organizations to deploy apps from the new Microsoft Store coming soon on Windows 11 (and Windows 10) to managed devices all from within Microsoft Intune or their unified endpoint management (UEM) solution. The company plans to share more information ahead of the public preview of the Intune integration in 2022.
