Let sanity rein in your SharePoint deployment and configuration management - SharePoint Action Framework (SAF) Released

Mark Jones - SAF is released!

“At Last! Finally, we have released the SharePoint Action Framework (SAF) on CodePlex!! Please take a look at : http://saf.codeplex.com .

Now that I can take a minute, I just wanted to spend a bit of time detailing why we have spent the best part of 18 months (with lots of late nights building it!) Here's a FAQ to give you some answers:

If you are developing with SharePoint, do you suffer from any of these ?

• Lots of Defects caused by differences in SharePoint Farms. – eg. “It works on Integration, but not on QA!” .
• Your Development team find it time consuming telling your Release team what to do for each release. “How hard can it be to put 5 columns in a Content Type?”
• You have release documents (notepad, word, etc) that don’t contain enough information on how to deploy, or they always miss things and are extremely time consuming to create. “By heck surely there must be a better way of telling the Operations team what I need doing ?”
• Deployments to key farms are always late and very stressful. “I hope we don’t get a release like that again, I didn’t finish till 2am”
• Developers find it hard to do daily builds as SharePoint Config is not part of the daily build process.
• Its hard to reproduce what you have on one farm to another.
• Changes to Testing and Live Farms never seem to be applied to the Development Farm.
• You have lots of Features doing "similar" things, but not many are reusable.

Why we built SAF (“Techy” answer)?

Put simply, SAF allows you to author SharePoint configuration changes so that you can install (“do”) or uninstall (“undo”) them on your Dev, Test and Live Farms. …

…”

CodePlex - SAF - (A SharePoint Build and Deployment Tool)

“…

Project Description
SAF is a way to automate and repeat configuration changes in SharePoint using "Actions". These actions can then be grouped together as Xml into a "Macro" and then run from a Feature, STSADM command. MSBuild or WCF Service (coming soon).

Installation Instructions
To install or upgrade SAF please read this : http://www.collaboris.co.uk/blogs/09-06-18/How_to_install_SAF.aspx

Latest Info
For the latest blog posts about SAF, please go here : http://www.collaboris.co.uk/Blogs/Mark.aspx?CntCatID=dc5a1df9-790f-43ee-b3e8-c0124927b7af

…”

While I don’t do SharePoint much these days myself, I do hear and read about it and it seems that configuration management, deployment and code promotion is a major pain point. I saw SAF and thought that it might those of you fighting this battle…

Some additional and related blog posts from Mark Jones, How to Install SAF, Run STSADM commands from SAF, Content Migration using SAF