SharePoint Site Provisioning

In the new modern world of Office 365 and SharePoint online, deciding an approach to SharePoint site provisioning for new SharePoint sub sites and site collections can feel like a daunting prospect. There are numerous different options available but how do you know which way to go?

Provisioning back then…

In the old days of SharePoint on-premise with MOSS and SharePoint 2010, it was fairly straight forward. Site definitions were the recommended way to define the site structure. Feature stapling could activate features to add and apply all sorts of components and content.

When SharePoint online first arrived, our options were limited. We could create a site using Powershell and add the necessary components as required, also using Powershell. We could write some web parts or app/addin to add to the out-of-the-box experience to support our business requirements.

Provisioning now…

Along came PnP Provisioning Templates that effectively wrapped up what we used to do in Powershell and CSOM into a defined schema. The thing that makes PnP Templates so good is the ability to create a template from a model site. The template can then be applied to an existing site to provide a kind of steady state.

And then came Site Designs, a kind of built into SharePoint, cut down PnP Template with all the good bits removed. That said, Site Designs could become awesome withe the right direction. Microsoft recently announced the ability to apply Site Designs to existing sites. Allowing categories of sites to be standardised across the organisation.

The future of provisioning…

We have PnP Templates, the PnP Provisioning Engine and Site Designs. But what about the settings and configuration that are not supported by either of these? What do we do, fall back to our old Powershell scripts? We can but that will just get us into a tangle. The future is in the technologies that wrap up the existing capabilities, get the most out of them and add value on top. I’m talking about ProvisionPoint here. In ProvisionPoint, it’s possible to create a site, apply a PnP Template, apply a Site Design, set a number of other settings and then call out to a web hook to run more configurations or integrate with other systems. Not only that, but the creation and configuration is handled in the ProvisionPoint provisioning engine. The engine caters for transient error, retries, known error codes and detailed progress logging.