Resolve The Missing App Launcher Issue In SharePoint Server 2016

Now in addition to these, with the new SharePoint 2016 Feature Pack 1, which was rolled out in November 2016, we can also add our own custom tiles that point to other SharePoint sites, external sites, legacy apps and more. This makes it easy to find the relevant sites, apps, and the resources to do your job. However, by default, the App Launcher will be missing in the suite bar, as shown below.

This is because it depends directly on the User Profile Service. We will have to provision an instance of User Profile Service Application before we can start using the App Launcher.

My Site Creation

Before we start creating the User Profile Service Application, we will create My Site site collection, which we will have to specify during the UPS creation, else we may get the error message given below. We can also opt to skip entering the My site URL during user profile Service creation and we can enter it after the provisioning of the Service Application.

From the site collection creation page, let’s create a new site collection, MySite is using the My Site Host template.

This will create My Site, Site collection which will hold My sites for the users. Now, let’s create the User Profile Service Application.

Create User Profile Service Application

Head over to Manage Service Applications section in Central Administration.

Select User Profile Service Application, which will open up the new Service Application creation page.

Specify the Service Application name, Service account and the database Server details, as shown below.

In My Site Host URL section, specify the URL of My Site site collection, which we had created earlier.

This will start the provisioning of the user profile Service Application.

Finally, we are done with the creation of the user profile Service Application and has associated My site with the UPS Application.

As one last step, we will also enable the self-Service site creation option by which the users can create site collection on their own. This is an optional step but comes in handy at times.

Test the App Launcher

Now, heading over to the suite bar, we can see that the app launcher has come up. By default, there will be a few tiles, which come with the app launcher. We can add more custom tiles to it, if we have applied SharePoint 2016 Feature Pack 1.

Summary

Thus, we saw how to resolve the missing app launcher scenario in SharePoint Server 2016.