How to download Microsoft Whiteboard without the Microsoft Store?

Question

I am looking for a way to download the Microsoft Whiteboard desktop application for Windows... but without going through the Microsoft Store.

For most other Office 365 apps that I have been interested in I have found other download options.

However, my various searches for Microsoft Whiteboard download options have all led me back to here:

https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/p/microsoft-whiteboard/9mspc6mp8fm4?activetab=pivot:overviewtab

That will not work for me - I cannot access the Microsoft Store. We are an Office 365 shop. Someone made the choice to disable the Microsoft Store app for... reasons.

Also, I tried following these steps to enable the Microsoft Store but it made no difference - Microsoft Store app is still disabled:

Windows 10 Troubleshooting: “Microsoft Store is blocked” Error Code: 0x800704EC

Answer 1

This is old, but still relevant since I encountered the problem today.

There are a couple caveats though:

• Please keep in mind that this solution does not support auto-updating, you'll need to manually keep track of the updated and/or put in place you own update mechanism.

• Depending on your organization's settings, you also might need to have access to Powershell (non-admin) and the Appx module.

The following website allows to get direct downloads links for Microsoft store packages and their dependencies: https://store.rg-adguard.net/

Juste paste the Microsoft store URL into the website, click the checkmark on the right, and you'll get a list of links.

Now, you will want to download one of each listed package for your computer architecture (most are x64 these days, but you might need the arm/arm64 ones)

So, for whiteboard at the time of writing, you will need to download the following packages (I recommend to download them all into a new folder):

• Microsoft.NET.Native.Framework.2.2_2.2.29512.0_x64__8wekyb3d8bbwe.Appx
• Microsoft.VCLibs.140.00_14.0.30035.0_x64__8wekyb3d8bbwe.Appx
• Microsoft.Whiteboard_21.10405.5658.0_neutral___8wekyb3d8bbwe.AppxBundle

Now we come to the installation.

If you're "lucky", you'll just have to double click on each packages, and for each of them click install.

If windows asks you what to do with it or you get a message that the application was disabled, open a powershell prompt in the folder you downloaded the packages in.

Assuming the only files in the folder to be the packages, the following will install them all

Get-ChildItems | Add-AppxPackage

This should install all of the packages.