If you work with SharePoint custom site templates regularly, and your organisation has separated development, test, and production environments, then you’ll probably have come across the issue where a custom site template you’ve saved in one environment as a solution package (WSP) uploads and activates fine in another environment but then fails with the familiar obscure message and correlation ID when you attempt to create a new site.
Sometimes the easiest way to resolve a missing SharePoint Solution dependency is simply to install it again. Often the solution package (WSP) is available on your development or test environment, but how do you download it from there? For sandboxed solutions, you can just go to the ‘Solutions’ section in Site Settings, but what about farm solutions?!
Whenever SharePoint (SP) is patched tests are run on the farm’s content databases (CDB) to check for issues. In most cases, patching can proceed without adversely affecting the farm but it never hurts to have a perfect and functional an environment as possible before making any changes. This article guides you through how to manually run the same CDB tests, and diagnose and fix any issues/errors that are reported.
Most of the time you shouldn’t need to get involved in anything like this, but upgrades/patches can often queue up one-time timer jobs that don’t get executed for some reason and can hold off other jobs (such as Add-in management) so they don’t run.
Anyone who’s done a reasonable amount of SharePoint administration will probably have come across services appearing to be stuck on a status Starting/Stopping. There can be many reasons for this, and this article aims to look at how to identify the cause and try to rectify it.
When developing SharePoint (SP) Add-ins, you will generally want to avoid having to deploy them to your SharePoint Online (SPO) tenancy’s public app catalogue until you are going to release them. Microsoft have catered for this and there is a way to enable a ‘developer’ app catalogue at site-collection level using some PowerShell commands.
There are going to be lots of occasions when you are going to want to merge the ULS logs from the individual SharePoint server instances that constitute your SharePoint farm. Fortunately, Microsoft provide a handy PowerShell command for just that purpose.
There can be times when a SharePoint Add-in instance just won’t install (or uninstall). You get the familiar “We’re adding your app” message on the new tile that has been added to the Site Contents page but nothing changes – it just stays like that.
The most common way of deploying SharePoint Solution Packages is at the command line. This is typically done using PowerShell and there are a couple of ways of doing it, that will be discussed here.
Everyone knows how to create lists via the web browser, but for developers it can often be easier and more controlled to use automation to create lists on target SharePoint sites, for custom solutions they are developing, and the easiest way to do that is often using PowerShell.