Winget supports now offline download - BUT Microsoft Store for business retires at August 15th 2024

Great news on the one hand side including bad news on the other hands side!

Its great to see that the Winget command download feature is now fully supported! Over 10 months ago Winget got the download support feature. But the store backend was not able to respond upon the requests. This is now fixed.

At the same time Microsoft decided to retire very soon the Store for Business at August 15th 2024. Here in Central Europe we have currently vacation season so this is really a great surprise and pressure for all SCCM admins taking advantage of the Store for Business to download apps. And there are now a ton of apps you have to take care of especially the built-in ones from Microsoft just think of Photos, Paint, New Teams just to mention a few of them.

For the full blogpost see here:
Downloading Microsoft Store apps using Windows Package Manager - Microsoft Community Hub

And for the commands see here:
winget download command | Microsoft Learn

Huge additional challenge for automation is you need a logged in Entra ID account or you get prompted with the standard Entra ID authentication.

You need to have one of these roles:

• Global Administrator
• User Administrator
• License Administrator

And there is still another drawback which is also not easy to fix for Microsoft itself as this information is dependent from software vendors as well. You do not see the version information of the software available from the store. So you may need to download first every couple weeks the potential update and then afterwards check the version as you see the version as part of the downloaded filename only.

Just continue my research how to fully automate this process. So check back soon.