Chapter 7
Managing the Solutions Gallery
Besides being a very powerful and full-featured collaboration tool out of the box, SharePoint is also a development platform. When you need to add capabilities to SharePoint that are not part of the deployed product, there is a mechanism for delivering that capability, formally called solutions.
The solutions gallery is used to hold elements of a SharePoint site that are repeatable and can be reused across sites. The gallery exists at the site collection level; therefore, anything placed in it is available on any site within the collection, but not in any sites outside the site collection. Items that can be placed in the solutions gallery include site templates created using the Save as Site Template command on the Site Settings page, and custom solutions written by developers that extend the capabilities of SharePoint. Once the element is created, it is deployed to the solutions gallery and becomes useable anywhere within the site collection. In this lesson we will be examining the ways a site collection administrator can use the solutions gallery.
The solutions gallery can be found on the Site Settings page under the heading Galleries. The main advantage of the solutions gallery is that it allows individual site collection administrators to deploy customizations that will not affect other site collections. This is a big deal because in days gone by, before this was possible, farm administrators would often disallow all site customization. ...
