Premise

In SharePoint, we can now use the location and map functionalities. These functionalities internally rely upon Bing Maps REST services. Though, we need not have to be concerned with this, as it is managed OOTB by SharePoint. However, these Bing Maps REST services are not completely free. You need to subscribe to one of there plans and generate a Bing Maps Key in order to use this service.

Solution

In this post we’ll discuss how to generate your Bing Maps Key.

Bing Maps services are not entirely free. In this post, I’ll be subscribing to a Developer License. To check the full list of available licenses and there respective features, please click here.

Let’s check out the steps.

• Navigate to Bing Maps Dev Center.

• If you’ve never registered to these services before then, first you need to create a new account.

• Fill in your details.

• Once, we’re logged in, we can see the following home page.

• Under My account, select My Keys.

• Create a new key.

Field Name	Is Required	Description
Application name	Yes	Name of the application
Application URL	No	This is for us. So that we can identify the purpose of this key in the future.
Key type	Yes	I’ll go with the default option, Basic. The Enterprise option comes with more features. You can check about them here.
Application type	Yes	I’ve selected, Dev/Test. The options here will change as per the value selected for the option, Key type.

• Once we hit the create button, a new key will be generated and shown in our dashboard.

• We can use the Show key option to view the key.

Key Takeaways

• If you already own a Azure subscription then, it can be added directly from the Marketplace.
• The entire feature works seamlessly with SharePoint, once we have our key.
• The key generated above will be used for billing as per the features selected.