The Package & Publish provisioning feature of skybow Solution Studio allows you to provide fast and robust delivery of your custom SharePoint solution from development to production environments using easy step-by-step wizard. It also allows you to update the target sites with any version of your solution.
If you make a deployment update to the customer's environment quite frequently, you may face a situation when someone works in target environment during the deployment process and it can bring some risks. Here are the possible risks that can occur for end users during the update process:
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The risk of catching updates on the form during the deployment update process:
- The updating package brings some changes in the forms (new columns, expression on fields, layout changes, styling, etc). When you open the form during the updating process, you should be able to save the form with the old configuration. When you open the form again or after reloading the page you should see the changes that came with the new version.
- If you change the properties of a field (in the SharePoint column settings) and make it required or add a validation, you may face the risk, that you will not be able to save the form (that was opened during the update process) if one of the fields become required, validation will work immediately.
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The risk of Triggered action execution:
- If a user is adding/updating items in a list having Triggered actions configured during the deployment update, there is a risk that at some moment the changes will not trigger the execution of the Triggered action and the actions will not be executed. This should only be the case if there were changes in the Triggered actions configuration or you force a full update, because then we remove the old Triggered action configuration and add the new one to the list.
- The risk related to the partial execution of the Triggered action like adding/updating items, etc on the list with a large number of items during the deployment update.
- The risk of failing the update deployment process if the user edits the modern page on the target site while updates also include changes on this modern page. If it is occurring at the same time as the updating process it can cause the error during deployment process.
- The risk of losing changes that were made to the list item on the target site. If you publish a list with content ('Package all items of this list as part of the solution' option is enabled) to the target site and the user edits list items on the target site, and then you make a deployment update for the same list (content is still included) with the force update option you can face a risk of losing changes that were made to the list items before updating.
In general, to avoid any possible conflicts during the updating deployment process we highly recommend doing the updating deployment process not during business hours (hours when the least amount of active users work under the site while the updating process). Maintenance hours could help you to make sure that user changes that occur on the target site during deployment will not be affected by changes that come with the deployment updates. Maintenance hours will minimize risks that users can encounter with configuration/logic changes that come with deployment updates.