IN THIS CHAPTER

Figuring out how a SharePoint feature works

Discovering some of the features that ship with SharePoint 2016

Using features to extend SharePoint

As you can read in Chapter 3, the term feature can be a bit confusing in SharePoint. You often hear people talk about functionality in terms of features. The term feature has a double meaning in SharePoint. The first meaning is in the traditional sense, so you could say web-based administration is a feature of SharePoint. The second meaning of feature is technical and specifically means a package of code that can be activated and deactivated (turned on and off).

In this chapter, you discover SharePoint features. You see how a feature works and which features are active by default. You also find out how to activate and deactivate features and explore some of the most common and helpful ones. Finally, you see how SharePoint can be extended with custom features.

Getting a High-Level View of SharePoint Features

We have to admit that SharePoint features took us a long time to really understand. The reason is that a feature can do anything in SharePoint. A feature is just a collection of code that alters SharePoint in some manner. For example, say you want to write some code that adds a new item to the drop-down list that appears when you click the Settings gear icon. SharePoint lets you do this in code. Now, how do you deploy it to SharePoint? How do you let site administrators turn it on and off? The answer is that you package that code up in a SharePoint feature. When the feature is installed, an administrator can activate (turn on) or deactivate (turn off) the feature. The result is that your custom item appears in the Settings drop-down list when the feature is activated and disappears from the drop-down list when the feature is deactivated.

SharePoint ships with a number of features out of the box. In fact, features can be a major source of frustration. Take the earlier example of a feature that makes an item appear on a menu when the feature is activated. The way you reach navigation in SharePoint (covered in Chapter 11) depends on whether a particular SharePoint feature is activated. That feature is the SharePoint Server Publishing Infrastructure feature. This feature does a lot of things when you activate it, including altering the settings links for navigation. Before you activate the feature, the navigation links on the Site Settings page in the Look and Feel section are displayed as Quick Launch and Top Link bar. When you activate the SharePoint Server Publishing Infrastructure feature, it removes those two links and adds one called Navigation.

You will find that the answer to a SharePoint question is often that it depends on which features are activated!

Turning On and Off Features

You turn on and off features by activating and deactivating them. Features are activated at two different levels. The first is a site collection; the second is a site. Features activated at the site collection level affect all sites contained within the site collection. Features activated at the site level only affect that particular site.

When a feature is active (turned on), a blue Active status indicator appears next to the feature on the right side of the page. See the Access App row in Figure 12-1 and note the Active button in the status column. When a feature is inactive (turned off) the status column is empty, as shown in the second row (Announcement Tiles Feature) in Figure 12-1.

To view a listing of all features for a particular site:

1. Click the Settings gear icon and choose Site Settings.

   The Site Settings page appears.

2. In the Site Actions section, click the Manage Site Features link.

   A listing of all the features for this particular site is displayed. Each feature includes an icon, name, description, Activate/Deactivate button, and status column.

To view a listing of all features for a particular site collection:

1. Click the Settings gear icon and choose Site Settings.

   The Site Settings page appears.

2. In the Site Collection Administration section, click the Site Collection Features link.

   A listing of all the features for this particular site collection is displayed. Each feature includes an icon, name, description, Activate/Deactivate button, and status column.

If you don’t see the Site Collection Administration section on the Site Settings page, then you do not have Site Collection Administrator permissions.

It’s easy to get turned around when working with SharePoint features. For example, if you are in a subsite and go to the Site Settings page for that subsite, you don’t see all the settings links in the Site Collection Administration section. You instead see a link that takes you to the settings page for the site collection. When you click that link, the Site Settings page reloads for the site collection, and you see all the Site Collection Settings links. (A site collection is also a site.) So if you then click the Manage Site Features link, you are actually managing the features scoped for only the site collection site and not the subsite where you originally started.

Exploring Common Features

Exploring all the features that ship with SharePoint could fill a book unto itself. Each feature on the settings page includes a name and description. We wish we could tell you that they are all straightforward, but they are not. Some features are massive and complicated and others are simple. For example, the SharePoint Server Publishing Infrastructure feature can do a mind-boggling number of things. Conversely, the Site Feed feature simply enables the use of site feeds on a site.

A couple of the most common features are the SharePoint Server Standard Site features and the SharePoint Server Enterprise Site features. These features include functionality for the different editions of SharePoint Server (Standard and Enterprise). The Standard Edition features include functionality such as user profiles and search, and the Enterprise Edition features include functionality such as Visio Services, Access Services, and Excel Services.

If you’re looking for functionality such as Excel Services, and you can’t find it, then check to make sure the SharePoint Server Enterprise Site feature is activated for your site.

Extending SharePoint with Features

Microsoft ships a ton of features with SharePoint 2016, but the product can always be extended further. If your organization has a dedicated development team, they can build features specific for your organization. For example, a company might use in-house developers to create custom SharePoint features for different groups within the company. For example, some features could provide functionality for the sales department, others for human resources, and still others for engineers. Each team in the company can then choose whether to activate or deactivate the features based on whether they need the specific features for their relevant workload on the SharePoint site.

Alternatively, third-party companies also develop features to extend SharePoint for a particular audience. For example, Portal Integrators has a Human Resources Solution, shown in Figure 12-2, that can be activated to extend SharePoint with human resources functionality. After installing a third-party feature, it shows up right alongside the features that Microsoft ships with SharePoint.