19 September, 2010

SharePoint 2010:Working with Site and Site Collection Features

Site and site collection features provide added capabilities to your SharePoint environment. While SharePoint Foundation 2010 only provided a couple of site and site collection features, SharePoint Server introduces many additional features. Some of these features support the capabilities provided through the site templates while others introduce a variety of new capabilities.

Before publishing a post on how to activate the site features, I am writing this post to describe brief introduction behind some usefull features which would be beneficial from business point of view.

Site Features

The site features available by default in SharePoint Server follow:

Content Organizer: Allow for the creation of rules based on metadata to route content to the appropriate location.

E-mail Integration with Content Organizer: Extend the site content organization features to receive and route e-mail messages.

Group Work Lists: Use this to identify if the Group Work Calendar list should be made available.

Hold and eDiscovery: Allow for the tracking of external actions that suspend the disposition of documents.

Metadata Navigation and Filtering: Provide lists with settings pages allowing them to be configured to use metadata tree views and filter controls.

Offline Synchronization for External Lists: Enable the ability to synchronize lists with Outlook and SharePoint Workspace.

PerformancePoint Services Site Features: Make the PerformancePoint Services list and document library templates available.

SharePoint Server Enterprise Site features: For enterprise license deployments of SharePoint Server, this feature activates the enterprise services, such as the business data catalog, forms services, and Excel services.

SharePoint Server Publishing: Include resources like the Pages library needed to create and publish web pages within a site.

SharePoint Server Standard Site features: Enable the standard SharePoint Server features, such as user profiles and searching.

Team Collaboration Lists: Also available in SharePoint Foundation and this feature enables team collaboration services in a site that allows for the use of lists and libraries.

Wiki Page Home Page: Create a wiki page as the site’s home page.



Site Collection Features

The following site collection features are available in SharePoint Server 2010:

Advanced Web Analytics: Makes web analytics reports available.

Content Type Syndication Hub: Creates a site that will act as the enterprise metadata hub site.

Custom Site Collection Help: Creates a library used to store custom help documents for the site collection.

Disposition Approval Workflow: Makes available a standard workflow that is used to manage the expiration of documents.

Document ID Service: Assigns IDs to documents. (These IDs can be used to retrieve documents independent of their current location.)

Document Sets: Provides the content types needed to create document sets that allow the grouping of multiple documents to be managed as a single entity.

In Place Records Management: Enables the ability to define and declare records

Library and Folder Based Retention: Allow list managers to set retention schedules on libraries and folders.

PerformancePoint Services Site Collection Features: Enables the PerformancePoint Services content types and site definitions

Publishing Approval Workflow: Enables a workflow for the routing of pages for approval as part of the page publishing process

Reporting: Enables SharePoint Foundation 2010 report creation capabilities.

Search Server Web Parts: Makes available web parts that are needed by Search Center sites

SharePoint 2007 Workflows: Makes the set of workflows that are available as part of SharePoint 2007 (MOSS) available within the SharePoint 2010 server environment

SharePoint Server Enterprise Site Collection features: Enables enterprise site features that are available with the enterprise license of SharePoint Server, such as business data catalog, forms services, and Excel services

SharePoint Server Publishing Infrastructure: Enables publishing-related functionality, such as welcome page management, master pages, and page layouts.

SharePoint Server Standard Site Collection features: Enables standard features introduced by SharePoint Server, such as user profiles and enterprise searches

Three-state workflow: Makes available a standard workflow that is used to track the state of items in a list

Workflows: Enables the SharePoint Server 2010 standard workflows

Any of the listed site and site collection features can be enabled or disabled to control the capabilities made available in the SharePoint environment.

Note: Some site and site collection features work together to provide sets of capabilities. It is important to understand the complete impact of disabling a site or site collection feature before making changes.

If you have any doubts/queries regarding the above mentioned information then please let me know,thanks..

21 comments:

  1. Brilliant Article ! It is great to know about the all features of sharepoint. I have very limited knowledge about it. Today, able to know something more only because of you.

    ReplyDelete
  2. No problem Sir-In case of any doubts/queries then please let me know.. I would be more than happy to help you as well as resolves your issues..

    Thanks a lot once again :-) :-)

    ReplyDelete
  3. Nice blog! I have a client that's having problem with the task approval form. It works in production but not in development. Very strange! The error message is saying that it needs to be republished using forms services web enabled form. When I go to the CA the InfoPath links are not listed and they are using Standard and not Enterprise, but they should still get the task list form to approve or reject the workflow. Can you help me with this and give me some possible solutions. Thanks!

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  4. Issue: Facing problems with the infopath forms.

    Error Message: " it needs to be republished using forms services web enabled form"

    Please refer the following steps and hopefully your issue will be resolved :-)

    -Before i proceed with the detailed steps, make sure that the form that you are using is having .xsn entension and not .xml
    -second thing, make sure you are publishing the form to the Form Library and not a normal Doc library.

    Detailed Steps:
    1. Right Click on the form and select Design option. This will open the form in design mode.
    2. Right hand side of the form, click on check for design errors, that will reflect any erros which are not compatible with the browser enabled functionality.
    3. Tools--->Form Options-->Compatbility-->Make sure the browser compatibility option is checked.
    4. if everything is has been set then i guess we are good with the publishing.
    5. Right hand side bottom-->Publish option/Office ribbon option-->Publish
    6. These steps are very simple-->When you proceed further-->One steps will ask you to check the option of browser mode publishing-->In this step-->Two options should be automatically checked-->1. Document Library 2. Browser Publishing
    7. in the next step-->If you have already created the form library then select update option/Create a new Form Library
    8. Thats it-->You will get the message that the form has been successfully published :-)

    Please check and let me know in case of any further queries/questions, Thanks for your patience...

    ReplyDelete
  5. I looked in the workflow list and it's not using an InfoPath form and is using .aspx page. That's what so strange. We are using the standard edition. Here is the error that displays:

    The specified form template could not be found, or is not compatible with rendering in the browser. It might need to be republished as a browser-enabled form.

    Click Try Again to attempt to load the form again. If this error persists, contact the support team for the Web site.

    Click Close to exit this message.

    Hide error details
    Correlation ID:1524b9f7-707d-4f18-9b5f-e004a4eb56e9

    *****
    When the approver clicks the link to approve the document the form is opened using AJAX...

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  6. Could you please try to move the workflow to a new list ? one more thing-Please try to clear the old versions that belongs to the same workflow, Thanks

    ReplyDelete
  7. Hi Amol,

    I want to hide the "Advanced Web Analytics feature" from the Site Collection Feature page (ManageFeatures.aspx?Scope=Site). I have tried using the below Code:
    SPContext.Current.SiteFeatures.Remove(_featureGUID, true)

    But its not removing the feature from the Page. However I am not able to see the feature using the below PowerShell Script:
    get-spfeature -webapp url

    Could you please advice?
    Thanks in advance!

    ReplyDelete
  8. The number of the features which you can see on the site settings (i.e. GUI) as well as the source where it all resides i.e. site collection as well as site featurs are all coming from the features folder.

    If you explore the 14 hive folder then you will get the features folders which consist of so many features..make sure you take the backup before making any modifications inside any features.

    when you will open the sepcific features then you will see certain code inside the .xml file

    some lines reflects visibility=true and some are false

    you need to check the exact feature that you are looking for and execute the changes, Thanks

    ReplyDelete
  9. Hi Amol,

    We have Sharepoint 2010 Foundation being setup in a Farm cluster.

    We want to use the In place records feature. Is this available with Foundation ?

    We tried to activate it through Site collection settings, but did not find the feature listed there.

    Please advise.

    ReplyDelete
  10. The In Place Records Management feature is only available in SharePoint 2010 Server and is not part of the SharePoint Foundation 2010.

    ReplyDelete
  11. I'm trying to create a site using a template and I keep getting a message to activate this feature: e978b1a6-8de7-49d0-8600-09a2503541e14

    What is this and how do I activate it?

    ReplyDelete
  12. open the site template gallery where you have saved the site as template

    hover your mouse to the dropdown of the same

    you will get the option of activate

    select activate and thats it

    try creating the site again and let me know in case of any issues, thank you

    ReplyDelete
  13. Thank you for your prompt reply. First, I don't see a "site template gallery".

    I had the admin active that previous feature and now I'm getting asked to activate another feature.

    ReplyDelete
  14. this is really very strange. can you please work closly with the site collection admin as you dont have a rights to activate that solution, because whichever the site that we saved as template, thats gets saved under site template gallery and only site collection administrator can activate it.

    just an FYI- if we save any list or library then ikts gets saved under list template gallery.

    but section is same i.e. Galleries and you can find both the links underneath.

    can you please check again and let me know, Thanks

    ReplyDelete
  15. Amazing how everyday you find out that you missed some important information! I know you published this article ages ago but I am embarrassed to admit that even though I work in the field I missed some of the mentioned above..

    ReplyDelete
  16. What types of Access 2010 application configurations will NOT tranport to sharepoint. I think I read somewhere that VB code will not.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Access client app can publish 'simple' tables to a SharePoint list

      Access client app cannot publish 'complex' databases to SharePoint as the compatibility checker will fail

      Any 'complex' Access client applications needing exposure to SharePoint either need to be uploaded as-is OR re-built from scratch in SharePoint using native SharePoint lists, OM, COM, LINQ, etc.

      Access client app .accdb file can be uploading into SharePoint library to be accessed by end users who have Access client application

      Access client app .accdb file stored in SharePoint library cannot be introspected by SharePoint API as would a normal list would be to expose fields and data.

      Web Access Databases, like the 'Contacts Web Database' or 'Issues Web Database' are self-contained Web Access databases. There is no way to expose the data using SharePoint API. The better solution would be to create a SQL database and connect via BCS to allow exposing data.

      Please let me know in case of any further information required. Thank you

      Delete
  17. Nice and Descriptive

    ReplyDelete
  18. Great Article… I love to read your articles because your writing style is too good, its is very very helpful for all of us and I never get bored while reading your article because, they are becomes a more and more interesting from the starting lines until the end.
    Sharepoint Training in Chennai

    ReplyDelete

Your feedback is always appreciated. I will try to reply to your queries as soon as possible- Amol Ghuge

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