The Windows Company Portal app once installed on users’ Windows devices with Intune, allows the end user to securely access and install approved company applications. This is a great tool for Administrators as you can create a simple experience for your users to find and use the applications they need.
In this tutorial, I am going to walk you through how to install the Company Portal portal application using Intune with the new Microsoft Store experience.
Page Contents
- What is the Company Portal app?
- Why should you deploy the Company Portal app?
- Company Portal Online vs Company Portal Offline
- How to install the Company Portal app with Intune using the new Microsoft Store integration
- How to remove the Company Portal app
- An error occurred when trying to get the manifest for app with package name: Company Portal Fix
What is the Company Portal app?
The Company Portal app is a Windows application installed on your device that you can access from the start menu. It contains all of the applications that have been made available to your by your organisation. It can be either downloaded individually from the Microsoft store or using an MDM such as Intune (the preferred method I will cover in this tutorial..!)
Why should you deploy the Company Portal app?
The Company Portal app is a great tool that allows you to provide your users access to apps and resources. Once it is installed, users can search through categorised apps to find what they need. Once they are familiar to the Company Portal app, it will act as a familiar location for you to distribute changes and for the end user to manage updates that apply to their apps.
Also, not all company applications are installed by default when you provision a user’s device. As job roles overlap and staff job duties expand, a user who previously did not need access to a specific application may now require access. Instead of that administrative burden falling on your IT team to install and license the needed app, the user should be familiar with going into the Company Portal app and installing the approved app themselves. Likewise, if a user changes department, when using groups in Azure AD you can allow other apps to become available automatically in the Company Portal for that user.
Company Portal Online vs Company Portal Offline
There are 2 types of deployment methods for the Company Portal app, online and offline. You should understand the difference between each type of deployment and how it can impact your user’s experience as Microsoft has not made it obvious with the name.
Company Portal Online
The Company Portal Online app is a user-based deployment method that will install automatically during the user provisioning stage of deployment (if marked as required within the app assignment in Intune). Likewise, this should be assigned to a user group within Intune.
Company Portal Offline
The Company Portal Offline app is a device-based deployment method and will install automatically during the device provisioning stage of deployment (again, if marked as required within the app assignment in Intune)
What you should know here is that both the Online and Offline versions of the app are dependant on the Microsoft Store services, so if the store is removed (which may be true for those using a VDI), the app deployment will fail.
So to summarise, if you want the company portal app to be installed before the user is logged in when the device is reset and provisioned with Autopilot, then you should use the offline version. If you want the Company Portal app to be installed when the user logs into the device and in the user’s context, then choose the online version.
How to install the Company Portal app with Intune using the new Microsoft Store integration
Now let’s go through actually deploying the Company Portal app with Intune with the new Microsoft Store experience.;
1. Start by signing into the Microsoft Intune admin center: https://endpoint.microsoft.com.
2. Select Apps from the left-hand menu, then select App apps.
3. Select Add.
4. From the App type drop-down list, select Microsoft Store app (new). The click select.
5. On the next window, click Search the Microsoft Store. This is an integrated feature that will allow you to search for apps within the Microsoft Store.
6. Search for the Company Portal App and click Select.
7. You should see a page showing you all the Company Portal app information. Click Next.
8. On the assignments page you can either include all users on select a target group. Once you have chosen your user assignment, click Next.
9. Lastly click Create and you are done. You should now see the Company Port app (new) from your all apps page.
How to remove the Company Portal app from Intune
With the new Store experience in Intune, removing the Company Portal app is now simple.
If you wish to uninstall the app from users’ devices, simply select the Company Portal app from the all apps page and click Properties.
Scroll down on the properties page and click Edit, next to assignments.
Make sure you remove the required users from under the ‘required’ heading and include the users under the ‘uninstall’ heading. Then click Review + save.
If the edit was successful, you should see the following notification at the top of the page.
An error occurred when trying to get the manifest for app with package name: Company Portal Fix
When the new Microsoft Store experience became available in my Microsoft Tenant, I immediately attempted to deploy the company portal app.
However, after selecting the company portal all from within the new store experience, I received the following error:
Interestingly the fix was fairly simple. I used a script to deploy the application in the first instance, then I was able to delete the app and re-deploy from the UI (not that this was necessary, but it proved to resolve the error).
The script can be found on the author’s GitHub page.
