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Two More Small Notes about Features with a Big F

In the process of working on some other topics for posting, I've noticed a couple of small details that you'll want to keep in mind when working with Features in SharePoint. I realize they may be kind of nit-picky, but I work in a world where not paying attention to the tiniest of details can lead to days or weeks of re-work. 

NOTE: Please read my previous post if you need some background on the difference between features and Features in WSS v3 and MOSS 2007.

The first is that when you're in the Site Settings pages, the links for administrating your Site Features and your Site Collection Features use the term "feature" in all lowercase.  Don't be alarmed, these are the admin pages you'll want to check out if you need to activate or deactivate Features in your site or site collection.

The other thing I noticed was that when you open one of those Feature administration pages, the list of features displayed has some icons showing up to the left of each available Feature.  I've opened these pages quite a few times in the past, and this was the first time that I've noticed that there are some difference between some of these icons. 

The most common one appears to be this: .  This is the Generic Feature icon.  It shows up next to basic Features like "Office SharePoint Server Publishing" and "Reporting".

Another icon you'll see is ; the Workflow Solution Feature icon.  This icon appears next to all the out of the box workflow-related features, such as "Group Approval" and "Collect Signatures Workflow".

The last icon that I found in a stock MOSS install is the WSS Team Collaboration Feature icon: .  This icon can be found next to the Team Collaboration Lists feature, and I would imagine that its purpose is pretty self-explanatory.

One aspect of custom-developed Features is that the developer can specify his or her own icon to be displayed with the Feature when it is deployed.  This can be helpful if you want to continue the practice of grouping Features according to their function or if you want to easily differentiate your custom Features from the stock ones. 

In the next few posts, I'm going to start going through some of the out of the box Features and what they do.  I apologize for not having written anything in a while, but my daughter got sick right before the Thanksgiving holiday, and those two items kept me pretty busy and it's been tough to get back into the swing of things.

Read the complete post at http://www.sharepointblogs.com/fortheuser/archive/2007/12/03/two-more-small-notes-about-features-with-a-big-f.aspx