Thursday, 28 February 2013

Solution Deployer for Sharepoint 2010

DOWNLOAD HERE

How it works

·         After you install, Solution Deployer for SharePoint 2010 provides a config.xml file in which there are various values to be populated as per your environment. This is a onetime task and you can populate multiple environments too. More details about this xml and how to fill it following sections.
·         Copy the WSP files to a location on any of the servers or all the servers along with the required text files.
·         Run the tool by selecting the required options in the GUI. Check the status of the deployment in the status update pane.
That’s it!!

Prerequisites

       SharePoint farm should be reachable from the computer the tool is running.
       PowerShell Remoting should be enabled on both the SharePoint servers and the computer on which the tool is running.
       The tool is supported to run on Windows 7, Windows Server 2008 and Windows Server 2008 R2. (CredSSP authentication support)
       Make sure the text files for each set of WSPs/change is available as described in user guide section.

Installation (One Time)

Installation is pretty much easy. Download the zip file to any server or computer from which you can reach the farm by executing the tool. Here is the step by step process in detail.
       Extract the contents of the zip file and leave the directory structure intact.
       Open PowerShell console with administrative privileges and execute the script ‘SPDeployerPreRequisiteSetupClient-OneTimeRun.ps1’ under “FirstTimeSetup-OneTimeExecution” folder. Remember that this should be run on the computers on which this tool is running.
Type Yes or Run Once where ever the script prompts you to do so.
       Copy the file “SPDeployer-PreRequisiteSetupServer-OneTimeRun.ps1” to all the application and web front end servers of the farm to a directory.
       Log on to all the application and web front end servers of the SharePoint farm and open
PowerShell console with administrative privileges. Change the directory to the place where
you copied the script to “SPDeployer-PreRequisiteSetupServer-OneTimeRun.ps1” and execute the same. Type Yes or Run Once where ever the script prompts you to do so.
That’s it. The environment is ready to run the tool.

Configuration Modifying Config.xml (One Time, and later, Need based)

This section basically describes about setting up config.xml. This xml contains all the SP2010 farm related information required for successful functioning of the tool. This is an Easy to fill xml. Caution should be taken not to change any tags. Only the values should be changed according to your needs. The points below explain about various tags. The tags missing in these point are obvious and need not be explained.
The XML is structured this way.
Parent Node (SHAREPOINT_CONFIGURATION) -> Environment Classification ->Application
Classification in each environment
1)       Fill the “EnvName” value as your environment name. For example, Development, Disaster Recovery etc.
2)       Fill the value between tags as the enterprise domain where the sharepoint farm resides and does user authentication.
3)       Fill the value between tags as the username with farm admin privileges or privilege to deploy WSPs and manage features. Do not mention
‘domain\username’ format but just ‘username’
4)       Fill the value between tags as the encrypted password of the farm admin user mentioned above. The password can be encrypted using
“encryptString.ps1” PowerShell script present in “EncryptionTool” directory of the extracted and installed folder. Right click on encryptString.ps1 and select “Run with PowerShell”. Provide the plain text password at the prompt and hit Enter. You will get the encrypted string. Copy and paste the encrypted string in between these tags in the xml.
5)       Fill the value between tags with all the application and web front end server names in comma separated format. The first server mentioned in the csv server list is the server used by the tool to do all the deployment work.
6)       Fill the value between tags with UNC or absolute path where you want to store all the logs of this tool. This logs who is working on the deployment and all the text shown in the status update pane.
7)       Fill the value between tags with the central administration solution management page URL.
8)       Fill the value of “AppName” in tags with the web application name.
9)       Fill the value of tags with the absolute path on the server where you store all the WSPs and the related text files. More details about the text files in the User guide.
10)   Fill the value of with the URL of the web application as you see in central administration.
11)   Fill the value of tags with the relative path of the IIS virtual directory of the web application.
The tags can be of any number based on your setup and so the applications under tags. 

Quick User Guide

The following are the quick steps to jump start using the tool.
1)      Maintain a common folder (deployment scripts base path) on any server of sharepoint farm and copy the WSPs deployed to that folder
2)      Create and copy 2 text files into the same directory whose names are of format “ChangeNumber_WSPList.txt” and “ChangeNumber_Features.txt” where change number is the actual change number for this release.
3)      List the wsps to be deployed in ChangeNumber_WSPList.txt comma separated with URL to which the WSP should be scoped. If it is global do not mention anything.
4)      List the feature IDs associated with the WSPs to be activated and deactivated in the ChangeNumber_Features.txt file.
5)      Run the SharepointDeployerV3.1.exe and fill in the required details. Click Apply Config button.
6)      This populates the WSP text files to be used for the deployment and features for activation and deactivation. Select the right options for the deployment and click Deploy.
7)      Check the status pane for updates.

User Guide

In order to maintain consistency, especially when deploying same set of WSPs across various environments, the following process works well but you can modify it as you need. The following steps are explained considering a general scenario of every enterprise into consideration. It might differ a little from what you do but it can always be customised.
Consider there is a requirement from business to sharepoint developers and the developers have written code in the form of 3 WSPs which creates 2 features to a sitecollection of web application webapp1. However all the WSPs are existing WSPs in production and they have to be replaced with these new ones. They want to deploy these 3 WSPs in Dev environment first. The enterprise is using Solution Deployer for Sharepoint to do the WSP deployments. Considering the enterprise practises ITIL Change and Release management, this is what the developer does.
1)       The developer creates a Change record and the change number is RFC12345. This is used to track the deployment till it reaches production from development.
2)       While building WSPs, the developer also creates two text files with following name format. This is a must.
a.        RFC12345_WSPList.txt
b.       RFC12345_Features.txt
The WSPList text file is used while retraction and deployment and Features.txt file is used during feature activation and deactivation. You can skip creating any of these files if you are not doing retraction/deploying or activation/deactivation.
3)       The content of RFC12345_WSPList.txt is as follows.


Basically it will contain the list of WSPs along with any specific URL to which the WSP need to be deployed to. The URL and the WSP are separated by a comma. Also if the WSP has to be deployed globally, there is no need to place a comma.

4)       The content of RFC12345_Features.txt is as follows.
 
Basically, this will contain the Feature IDs or Feature Names of the features that are going to deactivated and activated in this particular deployment and the scope of the feature. All the features listed will be deactivated and activated if the option is selected in the tool. If no scope is mentioned, it gets deactivated the default scope.

5)       Now, the directory in which you copied the WSPs and the above text files is the deployment scripts base path and the absolute path of this directory should be placed in the tags in config.xml file.
6)       Launch the tool by double clicking on SharepointSolutionDeployerV3.2.exe file.


7)       Provide the RFC Number in the first field. For example RFC12345
8)       Select the environment
9)       Select the application of the environment to which deployment is happening
10)   Click on Apply Config to populate all the fields in section below. The fields will be auto populated based on the process that we have followed earlier. In cast the file names or paths are different, you have an option to change them.































11)   Check the boxes for the actions that you want to carry out and click on Deploy button.
12)   The tool will complete all the required validations during execution and complete the required actions that are selected. The status is shown in the status field.
Points to Note:
a)       The tool is basically a powershell script wrapped up in an exe. So there will be a console window that opens along with the tool. The console window displays any errors during execution and also displays overall status messages as well.
If you do not want the console to open and you want just the GUI, execute the exe with – noconsole option.
b)       Make sure you populate the encrypted password and other values in config file properly. Any mistakes in config file will lead to mistakes and errors. The encrypted password feature is to enhance the security.
c)       If you do not want to follow the process mentioned above, you could still use the tool by modifying the text file paths on the server during execution.
d)       In case you want to use different text files for retraction and deployment, you have an option in the tool to retract using a different file. By selecting the option, the tool will consider the file that you mention here for retraction and the actual WSPList file for deploying WSP files.
e)       There is an option for config file changes which halts the execution of the tool in case you want to make any other changes after deactivation/retraction/deployment/activation steps. This might include changing any web.config entries or owstimer.exe.config entries etc. You can select the options on prompt to continue further with IIS reset and timer restart.
f)        The sequence of actions carried out by the tool is 
a.        Deactivate features
b.       Retract Solutions
c.        Deploy solutions
d.       Activate features
e.       Config File Changes
f.         IIS reset
g.        Timer restart
If you do not select any option in the above list, the tool will skip that action but the sequence is maintained.


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