Sandboxed Solution Activation In Office 365 SharePoint

This weekend Microsoft silently made a change in Office 365 that highly affects installation and upgrade of the kalmstrom.com SharePoint sandboxed solutions. Existing installations will work as before, but new installations cannot be activated in SharePoint Online. We have of course already begun re-building our products to solve the problem.

No activation
It has been important to us to keep SharePoint sandboxed solutions and not only offer apps/add-ins, because add-ins are not supported by SharePoint 2010 and lower. Developing sandboxed solutions is a common way to add features to SharePoint, but Microsoft has now made it impossible to activate most sandboxed solutions in SharePoint Online.

In the long term we will go over to SharePoint add-ins, but we will not suddenly give up sandboxed solution because of this activation issue. By changing the way our sandboxed solutions are installed and upgraded, we can continue to offer a sandboxed solution that can be used also on SharePoint Online.

No problem for existing installations
kalmstrom.com Subscribers who use Office 365 SharePoint don't have to worry about their installations, because existing installations are not at all affected by the change.

However, the kalmstrom.com workgroup subscriptions allow free upgrades and an unlimited number of installations within the organization, and from this weekend and until new versions have been published subscribers who use SharePoint Online cannot take advantage of these benefits. No new installations can be made and existing installations cannot be upgraded.

No Office 365 trials
Currently we cannot offer the normal 30 days trial of the kalmstrom.com sandboxes solutions for evaluators who are using Office 365 and SharePoint Online, as the activation will not work for them. We have added info about the issue on all download and upgrade pages for sandboxed solutions.

We already know how to solve this new problem with SharePoint Online, and we are now giving highest priority to update all kalmstrom.com products that are affected by the new limitation. You can see their icons in this blog post.

Peter Kalmstrom
CEO and Systems Designer
kalmstrom.com Business Solutions

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