Without a lot of fanfare, Microsoft (NASDAQ: MSFT) launched the Beta of the Office 365 Marketplace last week. It's an online app store for Office 365, Microsoft's online version of Office, but more interestingly it also is an online app store for SharePoint.

As one analyst pointed out, an app store for SharePoint is a long-time coming as it relies heavily on partners to fill in the holes in the popular content management solution. The old saying goes that SharePoint does a lot of things, but none particularly well. Sometimes good enough is good enough, and sometimes you turn to a third-party solution to fill in.

Given the shear number of partners, it's especially surprising that the Marketplace went live with just 100 applications. They also added links to 400 professional services, which probably says a lot about how much people customize SharePoint and require professional service experts to help do that.

According to Network World, one of the reasons for the dearth of applications is strict requirements for getting into the Marketplace. As this seems like such a natural fit for SharePoint partners, it's surprising that Microsoft would put numerous restrictions on it.

For a service like this to succeed, it needs to get seeded with good content from the get-go and it sounds like Microsoft might have put up too many obstacles to allow that to happen. 

Still, hard to count out anything related to SharePoint and we'll just have to see if this succeeds in spite of the slow start.

For more information:
- see the Network World article
- see the LA Times article

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