Upload a SharePoint Sandbox solution to Office 365

A Windows SharePoint (WSP) solution is a cab file that enables us to deploy data lists and web content like JavaScript, CSS, ASPX assets to a SharePoint site. It is a sandbox solution because it only enables us to deploy assets that can run on the browsers. When deploying to Office 365, we need to deploy the WSP file to a site that has the solutions feature available. In this article, we take a look at creating a developer site, uploading a solution and then enabling the feature that contains the assets that we need to deploy.

Creating a Developer Site

To create a developer site, we need to visit the SharePoint Admin center. This is available from the Admin->Admin Centers option on Office 365.  We want to be able to visit the Site Collection Management area and create a new site collection. We can access that area directly by vising this link:

https://ozkary.sharepoint.com/_layouts/15/online/SiteCollections.aspx

Note: Replace ozkary with the corresponding site  tenant name.

On the site collection page, we can press the New button and create a Developer Site collection. In our example, we name or site collection dev which create URL similar to sites/dev. We can use any meaningful name.

https://ozkary.sharepoint.com/sites/dev

Upload the Solution

Now that we have a developer site collection, we can upload the WSP solution. This is done by visiting the developer site collection that we created on the previous section.  We can now select Site Settings-> Web Designer Galleries > Solutions or just visit this link:

https://ozkary.sharepoint.com/sites/dev/_catalogs/solutions

We are now ready to upload and activate our solution by pressing the Upload button and selecting our solution file. Once uploaded, the Activate button becomes enable. We just need to press it to activate the solution.

Enable the Feature

All SharePoint solutions have components or features that need to be enabled independently.  Once the solution is active, the features become available either at the Site or Site Collection level. This depends on how the scope of the feature is set.

When set teh scope to Web, the feature is installed at the site level. When set the scope to Site, the feature is available for the entire site collection.  For our example, we have a site scope feature, so we need to enable it from Site Settings -> Site Actions -> Manage Site features.  We could also just visit this direct link:

https://ozkary.sharepoint.com/sites/dev/_layouts/15/ManageFeatures.aspx

We should be able to find the feature name and press the Activate button.

Checking the Content

Now that we have activated the feature, all the content in our solution feature should be deployed. To validate, we need to visit Site Contents menu option. This should display the new data lists and other content that was deployed.

I hope this is able to provide an overview on how to upload a solution to Office 365.

Thanks for reading.

Originally published by ozkary.com