How to publish a solution with site collection admin permissions only

This article is targeting to deployments on SharePoint Online. If you are looking on how to deploy your solution on SharePoint Server, check out this: How to install your Solution built with Solution Studio Online on SharePoint Server 2013 / 2016!

Issue on publishing

Solution Studio has to be approved by a tenant administrator the first time a tenant is used: Approve this tenant

If you struggle using the direct deploy option in Solution Studio, because you don't get the tenant admin approval, skybow provides an option which uses less permissions using a site collection app catalog.

Read more about the site collection app catalog here: https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/sharepoint/dev/general-development/site-collection-app-catalog

Create a site collection app catalog - In a nutshell

Start the SharePoint Online Management Shell and run the following 3 command

# connect to your SharePoint Online tenant
Connect-SPOService https://contoso-admin.sharepoint.com
# get a reference to the site collection where the
# site collection app catalog should be created
$site = Get-SPOSite https://contoso.sharepoint.com/sites/marketing
# create site collection app catalog
Add-SPOSiteCollectionAppCatalog -Site $site

This will create a new list "Apps for SharePoint" in the root site of your target site collection

Publish a skybow solution using an Add-In

In the publish wizard in Solution Studio choose "Manual installation" instead of "Direct to SharePoint site".

After that you can download the add-in in the right panel. Just extract the .app file from the downloaded zip.

Now navigate to the new "Apps for SharePoint" list, which was created in your target site collection you want to deploy your solution and upload the .app file there

Create a new subsite or go to the target site within the site collection where you want to have the solution to be deployed to and click "Add an app" from the site menu.

Your solution should be available there. Otherwise you should be able to find it in the "From your Organization" section in the left navigation.

Click on the solution and trust it. It's a skybow solution manager add-in which has all the information about your solution and the version to be installed.

Note that scripting capabilities needs to be activated on target site.

The solution is automatically deployed and you will see the deployment and a log if there were errors back in the Solution Studio in the Publish section under Add-In Deployments when it's finished.

Update your solution deployment

If you make some changes to your solution after the initial deployment, you have to create a new package and then you can simply select the deployment definition in the Publish section of solution studio and click on update.

Note that scripting capabilities needs to be activated on target site (except package is not including any classic features and contains only list's default New-/Edit-/DispForms)

This will not automatically update any deployments, you have now 2 options to update them separately.

1. Select a deployment in Solution Studio and click on Update in the right panel
   
2. Navigate to the add-in homepage on the target site and click on Update there. The new version should be recognized.