SharePoint 2010 - Content Deployment Woes Part 2: Custom Features

If you are reading this post, please read through my previous post on this topic to get some background on tricks to solving the "Could not find Feature" issue with built-in SharePoint features.

If you are still reading, then you have probably built and deployed custom features to your farm, such as a web part. You are then running into problems during Content Deployment jobs between farms that have different SharePoint versions on them, such as deploying from Enterprise to Standard.

The solution that worked for the built-in features was appropriate because the features that were causing the problems didn't need to be installed on your destination farm. But with custom features, that is not the case. You built them precisely because you need to be able to run them on the destination farm.

I encountered this same problem and it took me a little while to figure out why it was unhappy. Here are the steps I'd suggest you follow:

• Check the 14-hive on the destination Web Front End to verify your feature is there.
• Verify that your feature is installed in the destination site. For instance, check the Site Features page for features scoped to the Site level
• Try enabling the feature and making sure it doesn't thrown any errors

Maybe you've done all those things and the feature looks good, but it's still not working? At this point, you should be confused. I know I was. I decided to check the settings on my package in Visual Studio. The Deployment Server Type was set to WebFrontEnd, which was correct. I then checked the 14-hive on the destination App Server, which is where Content Deployment jobs are run. No feature folder there.

Now I know what you're thinking - isn't that what we want? Solutions that are targeted as WebFrontEnd are marked that way for a reason - they don't need to be on the App Server because it's not serving up those web parts. Well, when it comes to Content Deployment, apparently they DO need to be there. I assume this is because the Content Deployment job is going through Central Administration, which is living on your App Server.

The solution I came up with was to enable the Microsoft SharePoint Foundation Web Application service on my App Server, effectively making it a Web Front End as well. This ensures that when I add solutions to my farm that the features get deployed to my App Server as well, effectively squashing the Content Deployment job errors I was receiving.

My App Server is already segmented off from the Web Front Ends by a firewall to keep it from being accessible from the internet. However, to ensure that my App Server is never used as a Web Front End, I am also making sure it is never listed in the load balancer and I am blocking traffic to port 80 on that box. This means there should be no real impact to the machine and my Content Deployment jobs can now run successfully.