SharePoint 2016 For Dummies

Chapter 12

Understanding SharePoint Features

IN THIS CHAPTER

Figuring out how a SharePoint feature works

Discovering some of the features that ship with SharePoint 2016

Using features to extend SharePoint

As you can read in Chapter 3, the term feature can be a bit confusing in SharePoint. You often hear people talk about functionality in terms of features. The term feature has a double meaning in SharePoint. The first meaning is in the traditional sense, so you could say web-based administration is a feature of SharePoint. The second meaning of feature is technical and specifically means a package of code that can be activated and deactivated (turned on and off).

In this chapter, you discover SharePoint features. You see how a feature works and which features are active by default. You also find out how to activate and deactivate features and explore some of the most common and helpful ones. Finally, you see how SharePoint can be extended with custom features.

Getting a High-Level View of SharePoint Features

We have to admit that SharePoint features took us a long time to really understand. The reason is that a feature can do anything in SharePoint. A feature is just a collection of code that alters SharePoint in some manner. For example, say you want to write some code that adds a new item to the drop-down list that appears when you click the Settings gear icon. SharePoint lets you do this in code. Now, how do you deploy it to SharePoint? How do you let site administrators ...