Introducing the PnP Provisioning Engine

This short whitepaper introduces the PnP Provisioning Engine […] now days with the new CAM the approach should be based on provisioning artifacts using the so called „remote provisioning“ technique. But what does mean to do „remote provisioning“? It means using the Client Side Object Model (CSOM) to provision artifacts, instead of using the feature framework.

Well, and what if I want to model and provision artifacts using a test and a production environment? Or what if I want to automate provisioning of artifacts, just because I want to sell my customizations to multiple customers? Or again, what if I want to define a custom site template that I want to re-use across multiple site instances, like customer-oriented sites, or project-oriented sites?

Using the new PnP Provisioning Engine, you can model – even simply by using the web browser – the design of Site Columns, Content Types, List Definitions and Instances, Composed Looks, Pages (either WebPart Pages or Wiki Pages), and much more. When you are done with the design, you can export what you have done into a persistent provisioning template format (XML, JSON, or whatever you like), and you can apply that template to as many target sites as you like.