Provisioning (Package & Publish) - Which solution elements are getting packaged?

Table of contents

• Quick Intro
• Solution elements that are provisioned by the Package & Publish feature
  • List Settings and Properties
  • List Columns
  • List Content & Permissions (optional)
  • Active Directory security groups
  • Groups & Roles (optional)
  • skybow Background Features
  • skybow Classic Customizations
  • skybow Modern Customizations
• What is not supported by Provisioning (Package & Publish)

Quick Intro

Package & Publish is a SharePoint provisioning feature provided by skybow Solution Studio that allows you to bring your custom SharePoint solution from development to production or deliver it to your customers with ease.

With this feature you can package lists and libraries, customizations, etc. and deploy it to any target site regardless if they are in the same or different environment. A simple and user-friendly interface in Solution Studio allows users to easily manage the deployment and update process. You can control versions of the solution you want to deploy. Package & Publish also provides an option to update target sites with any version of your solution in a few clicks. The Package & Publish feature is available for both, classic and modern solutions.

Below in this article it's described in more detail what elements and properties of the solution are getting packaged (and published).

Solution elements that are provisioned by the Package & Publish feature:

• Dossiers with sublists and sublibraries including all forms and views
• Lists and Libraries (with ootb and customized forms)
• Content of lists and libraries (optional per list/library, not activated by default)
• skybow Background Features (field calculations, Scheduled & Triggered Actions)
• Pages (Wiki Pages, Modern Pages)
• Solution Images
• Navigation
• Site Logo / Footer
• Groups & Roles

List Settings and Properties

Most properties you have set on the list/library settings will be packaged. In particular, the following properties can be distinguished:

- General settings includes Name, Description and Navigation; To include links on the left navigation you need to include them on the Navigation tab of Solution Elements.

- Versioning settings: Content Approval and Item Version History options

- Advanced settings include Content Types management, Attachments, Folders, Search, Index Non-Default Views and Quick property editing

- Workflow settings: Supported SharePoint 2013 Workflows

- Enterprise Metadata and Keywords Settings: Enterprise Keywords

- Content Types: Beside the List Content Type, it's custom parent Site Content Type will be included in a package as well. 

- Site Columns: Package includes Site Columns if it's added to the list.

List Columns

Supported columns of lists and libraries by provisioning (Package & Publish):

List Content & Permissions (optional)

Including content of lists (items) and libraries (documents/folders) in a package for provisioning can be activated selective for lists/libraries by the option on the Package & Publish Options tab (formerly called "Content") in Things in background (not active by default).

On the same place is another option available to include the permissions of the list/library and it's items in the package to publish these unique permissions as well to the target site. (Inherited permissions will be kept inherited on target site - unique permissions will be applied). This option is activated by default for new lists and libraries.
Used custom SharePoint Groups and Permission Levels will be as well automatically included in the package and added during publishing to target sites.

Active Directory security groups

There is a possibility to provision permissions granted to the Active Directory (AD) security group. If you add an AD security group to the SharePoint group or you assign direct permissions to the AD security group on the site/list/folder/item, permission assignment of the AD security group will be packaged and published to the target site.
Note: During the publishing process the existence of the AD security group on the target site by name is checked. In case the AD security group doesn't exist on the target site you will get a warning in publishing logs.

Groups & Roles (optional)

In Groups & Roles (in Solution Elements) can get managed/specified which SharePoint Groups and Permissions Levels will be packaged on source and published to the target site (users and active directory groups are out of scope for logical reasons due to environment independency).
Groups & Roles displays all SharePoint Groups and Permissions Levels including the default ones that belongs to the current site.
Existing default Groups and Permission Levels will be reused from target site during publishing.

In case the current site has unique permissions (not inherited from parent site), these site permissions can optionally get included into your package to publishe to the target site.

skybow Background Features

All available skybow Background Features will be packaged and published by Solution Studio: Scheduled and Triggered Actions, Metadata Inheritance, Aggregation and Calculated Expressions.

skybow Classic Customizations

skybow customizations related to Classic Experience like Rich Forms, Action Links, List View Search are also provisioned for deploying to the target sites. 
Major sublist web part options will be published as well - except Target Audiences and Display search box.

skybow Modern Customizations

All available skybow Modern components will be packaged and published by Solution Studio: skybow List Actions and Modern Forms customizations (Form Layout & Logic configuration, Form Settings, Command Bar Actions, Form Load Actions, Styling and other related form parts)

What is not supported by Provisioning (Package & Publish):

• Site Settings:
  - Multilanguage settings (only default site language is packaged)
  - Site and Site Collection Feature activation status
• List Settings:
  - Validation settings of the list
  - Launch forms in dialog window (Classic Experience)
  - Customization of custom site column on the list level will not be provisioned
• Web part Settings (Classic Experience):
  - Target Audiences for sublists
  - Search Box for sublist: uncheck this option will not be packaged into the target site
  - Connections between web parts
• Subsites
• SharePoint On-Premises:
  - Modern Pages
  - Customized Modern Forms
  - Background Features

Hint: Additional information about the solution elements that have been included in your package can be found in the package logs in Solution Studio.
After deployment, you can also check the publish logs to see which solution elements were deployed to the target site. (Publish logs on SharePoint On-Premises are stored in the package folder where you started the installation by PowerShell).