Moving Sites Templates Between Servers and with Feature Dependencies
Whilst moving sites from one environment to another can be reasonably easy, the process can raise feature dependencies. This is because few servers have exactly the same features.
When you copy a site to another server via SP template, you may receive an error similar to the following error or a non-specific SP error with GUID.
This just means a particular feature which is active on your on server1 is NOT active on server2.
You can resolve this in two ways:
- By deactivating the feature in server1 and taking a new copy of the site collection.
- By Enabling the missing feature on your server2 environment if you have access.
You have the GUID or unique identifier in the warning below to help you identify the missing feature.
To deactivate the feature on Server1 as described in point 1 above do the following.
You need to identify the feature. Here is a helpful PowerShell (run PowerShell as admin) command to list all SPfeatures irrespective of their scope and sort them by the GUID is…
Get-SPFeature | Sort -Property Id
If it is a BrightWork site you are restoring, you should create a regular SharePoint site from the SharePoint template you just created and then create a project site from this to make sure there are no further dependencies. Return to the regular site you just created a project site from and delete it.
