Sign up for an Office 365 Developer Site
apps for Office and SharePoint
Learn how to sign up for an Office 365 Developer Site to develop, test, and deploy apps for Office and SharePoint.
Applies to: Office 365 | SharePoint Server 2013 | SharePoint Foundation 2013 | Visual Studio 2012 | apps for Office | apps for SharePoint
Use an Office 365 Developer Site as a development and testing environment to shorten your setup time and start creating, testing, and deploying your apps for Office and SharePoint. Deploy the "Napa" Office 365 Development Tools to this preconfigured SharePoint site and you also get a head start on developing SharePoint-hosted apps, and apps for Office documents and mail items, without installing Visual Studio 2012 and Office Developer Tools for Visual Studio 2012 on your development computer. With an Office 365 Developer Site, you get an isolated app domain for SharePoint-hosted apps, preconfigured to use OAuth, so that you can use the Windows Azure Access Control Service (ACS) for authenticating and authorizing provider-hosted apps for SharePoint that are deployed to this site.
You may already have access to an Office 365 Developer Site. Here are three ways to get one:
- Are you an MSDN subscriber? Visual Studio Ultimate and Visual Studio Premium with MSDN subscribers receive a 1-year Office 365 Developer Subscription as a benefit. Redeem your benefit today.
- Do you have a midsize business and enterprise (Plan E1 or E3) Office 365 subscription? You can provision a Developer Site from the Office 365 admin center. For more information, see How to: Provision a Developer Site using your existing Office 365 subscription.
- You can either start with a free 30-day trial, or buy an Office 365 developer subscription (with one user license for either option) by using one of the following links. This subscription costs $99.00 per year.
We’ll open each of these links in another window or tab to keep the following instructions handy.
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This customized Office 365 subscription includes all the tools and resources you need to jump in and start building apps:
- SharePoint Online developer site, customized for creating and testing apps
- You can install "Napa" Office 365 Development Tools, to create your first apps right within the browser
- Office Professional Plus 2013
- Exchange Online
During signup, you’re asked to supply a subdomain of .onmicrosoft.com and a user ID to assign to the domain that you’re creating, as shown in Figure 1. After signup, you have to use the resulting userid (in the format userid@yourdomain.onmicrosoft.com) to sign in to your portal site where you administer your account. Your SharePoint 2013 Developer Site is provisioned at your new domain: http://yourdomain.onmicrosoft.com.
If you’re logged into another Microsoft account when you try to sign up for a developer account, you might get this message: “Sorry, that user ID you entered didn’t work. It looks like it’s not valid. Be sure you enter the user ID that your organization assigned to you. Your user ID usually looks likesomeone@example.com or someone@example.onmicrosoft.com.”
If you see this message, log out of the Microsoft account you were using and try again. If you still get the message, clear your browser cache or switch toInPrivate Browsing and then fill out the form.
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Figure 1. Office 365 Developer Site domain name
When you finish creating your apps and want to sign on to the Seller Dashboard and publish them to the Office Store, you use your individual Microsoft account (on the live.com domain) instead of the user ID that you created on your new Developer Site domain.
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After you finish the signup process, your browser will open the Office 365 admin center page, as shown in Figure 2. You can download the Office 2013 client applications by clicking the Download Software link that appears under the admin shortcuts heading on the right side of the page.
Figure 2. Important links on the Office 365 admin center page
You’ll have to wait for your Developer Site to finish provisioning. After provisioning is complete, refresh the admin center page in your browser. Then, click the Build Apps link in the upper left corner of the page to open your Developer Site. You should see a site that looks like the one in Figure 3. If you see a team site instead, wait a few minutes and launch your site again.
Figure 3. Your Developer Site home page
When you finish provisioning an Developer Site, you can start developing apps for Office and SharePoint in two ways: by using Visual Studio 2012 or by installing the "Napa" Office 365 Development Tools without having to install Visual Studio 2012.
"Napa" Office 365 Development Tools is a browser-based authoring tool that makes developing apps for Office and SharePoint quick and easy. You can’t use the "Napa" Office 365 Development Tools tools to create provider-hosted or autohosted apps for SharePoint, but you can use them to create SharePoint-hosted apps. And you can download the solutions that you create with the "Napa" Office 365 Development Tools and open them in Visual Studio 2012.
You can install "Napa" Office 365 Development Tools in the same way you install any other published app for SharePoint (.app) package in the Office Store.
- Sign on to your Office 365 Developer Site.
- Click the Build an App tile.
- On the details page of the "Napa" Office 365 Development Tools app, choose ADD IT to install the app. You might see a prompt asking you to select one of the supported languages.
- Choose the Continue button to confirm that you wish to add the app on the next page.
- After you sign in, you’ll be granted a license for the app. Leave the installation check box selected, and then click the Return to site link.
- Choose the Trust It button in the next window.
- After installation is complete, click the "Napa" Office 365 Development Tools icon on the All Site contents page to launch "Napa" Office 365 Development Tools.
If you don’t have the Office Developer Tools for Visual Studio 2012 installed on your developer computer, those tools are installed when you choose the Open in Visual Studio button from "Napa" Office 365 Development Tools.
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