At this weeks New Zealand Digital Workplace Conference I attended a session introducing the Provisioning PnP (Patterns and Practice) resources. This is a fantastic resource for SharePoint Online administrators and consultants.

It provides a set of PowerShell commands that allow administrators to build a template of a SharePoint Online site (or features within a site e.g just a library or list) and then redeploy the template to another site.

Three big features:

• It isn’t tenant specific, so you can make a template from one tenant and deploy to another. Great for Dev to UAT to Production.
• The templates can be updated and redeployed to update existing sites built from the template!
• The templates are XML files that can be manually updated.

The Provisioning PnP also includes commands that can help audit sites, lists and libraries for specific settings. For example, you can find a list of sites with a specific feature enabled or web-part installed.

The Provisioning PnP is free and is part of a larger PnP resource which is receiving monthly updates.

Resources:

• Introducing PnP PowerShell Cmdlets 
• Getting started with the PnP Provisioning Engine

This is a fantastic addition to the tool kit but wait there’s more. The PnP website is full of useful resources, created by experts for the community.

Thank you to Paul Culmsee for sharing his experiences with us at #DWCNZ.