Windows Phone Apps cannot be deployed in ConfigMgr 2012 R2 SP1

Within ConfigMgr and Intune it's possible to import mobile apps for Microsoft, Apple and Google. When adding Windows Phone app packages from the Windows Phone Store however, you may have an issue as described below.

As an administrator, when you use ConfigMgr, you experience the following symptoms: When you click the Browse button in the Create Application Wizard to create a valid link in the Windows Phone app package browser, the link is not resolved and you cannot click OK. When you try to provide the location manually instead of by using the Browse button, you receive the following error message: Specify a valid link to a Windows Store app.

This occurs even when you use a valid link in the following format: https://www.microsoft.com/locale/store/type/AppName/AppID
You can still use the following old format in the Location field: https://www.windowsphone.com/locale/store/app/AppName/GUID

When you use ConfigMgr app compliance policies to try to create an Allowed Apps or Blocked Apps list for Windows Phone 8.1 devices, you cannot create the list. 

With Intune (standalone) no issue is seen when adding a LinkedIn URL (Dutch).

 

When doing the same in ConfigMgr, you get an error message mentioning the URL is invalid.

Lucky me Microsoft has released an hotfix for this. It can be applied on both ConfigMgr 2012 R2 SP1 (RTM) and CU1. Just have a look here: Hotfix Download Available. After installing the hotfix the issue is gone immediately :-)

Thanks to Peter van der Woude (@pvanderwoude) and Frans Oudendorp (@oudendorp) for support on this.