Chapter 13: Using Features and Solution Packages
What’s In This Chapter?
- Understanding SharePoint Features
- How to manage Features
- Working with SharePoint Solutions
- How to manage Solutions
- How to create a basic Feature and Solution Package
All SharePoint administrators should understand both Features and Solutions. While the creation of Features and Solutions is typically a development role, administrators need to understand their main components in order to manage and support them, as well as to understand a Feature or Solution’s impact on the farm.
Features are a key building block of SharePoint, and much of SharePoint’s own functionality is implemented using them. A Feature is a collection of elements that are grouped together and, though they are not required to be, usually composed of logically related elements. An element can be almost anything in SharePoint: a Web Part, a workflow, a content type definition, an event receiver, etc. Name an artifact in SharePoint and the odds are good that it can be an element in a Feature. Once Features are installed, they can be activated or subsequently deactivated so that their functionality can be enabled and disabled. As you have seen in previous chapters, the authors may have asked you to either activate a Feature or ensure that a specific Feature was already activated.
The SharePoint Solution infrastructure enables you to have a single deployment point for all of the servers in your farm, and to schedule deployments and updates ...
