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Last night we deployed a new set of Sharepoint features to a load balanced environment. For some reason the new features are on 1 box but are not showing in the sharepoint sites on the others.

We have 4 servers and we deployed to them by pulling 1 server out of rotation, stopping the app pool and deploying our new code and the new features. Then we would fire it back up and add it to the rotation. For the remaining servers we would only remove the server from rotation, stop the app pool, and deploy the code, NOT the features, then fire it back up and add it to the rotation.

Any thoughts on why the features are not showing up on the other servers? Also, any thoughts on forcing the features to show up?

Thanks in advance.

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  • that certainly is an interesting way to deploy code to a sharepoint farm- has it worked in the past?
    – Jim B
    Jun 10, 2010 at 16:47
  • @Jim New to the team, so I don't know any past challenges they have had. I think its been at least a year since they deployed a new sharepoint feature.
    – Adam
    Jun 10, 2010 at 17:50

1 Answer 1

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If you are not using a solution package you have to do everything manually that building a WSP file and using stsadm to deploy does. Aside from the myriad of things that could go wrong manually, I suspect that you did not copy the features into the template\features folders on the other servers 12 hive.

From an admin perspective there is no way I would let a developer deploy code to a production server like this.

  1. this causes an outage per server
  2. way too manual (yes, even I make the occasional mistake)
  3. Rollback means doing a restore (depending)
  4. upgrades mean doing it all over again (because we know that the first release is almost never the last)

All of these issues are avoided using a solution file.

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  • I just learned that the server we deployed our features to was not in the rotation and it looks like the features were not copied to the other servers 12 hive as you had said. I don't know if they use a solution package or not, if using a solution package how would the deployment be different? Currently we are scripting the deployment to execute the stsadm tool to deactivate, uninstall, and install features.
    – Adam
    Jun 10, 2010 at 17:50
  • A solution package automates the install of a feature. It performs the install automatically and in a farm envrironment can be deployed to all servers via central admin. See this slidedeck slideshare.net/CoreyRoth/deploying-code-in-share-point) and check out www.dotnetmafia.com
    – Jim B
    Jun 10, 2010 at 19:35

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