Overview

Jint Site Factory is a feature that allows you to quickly and easily duplicate collections of SharePoint sites from templates. We will use "sites" instead of "site collections" throughout the rest of this guide.

Site Factory has two distinct areas dedicated to the two available actions:

• Create and extract a template
• Apply a template to a site

Technical requirements

To use Site Factory, you must meet the following requirements:

• Site Factory requires permissions to operate. You grant these permissions through the Azure Jint Site Engine application. You can find more information in Jint prerequisites and installation
• The user must have access to Site Factory in the Jint configurator. Access is granted by the Jint global administrator in the user management menu.
• The user must be the site administrator of the site they want to extract as a site template
• The user must be the site administrator of the site to which they want to apply a site template

What is a template?

The site template is a faithful reproduction of most of the elements of a SharePoint site. This template includes:

• Libraries, their settings, and their contents. This includes:
  • Pages
  • Documents
  • Events
  • Lists
• Library settings
  • Library columns
  • Permissions
• Library contents. Your documents and pages will therefore be copied identically to the target site.
• List contents, such as the taxonomy data for your pages
• The site-specific taxonomy
• The site-specific search settings
• SharePoint group permissions: defining who can access and modify the content.
• Appearance elements, such as the logo and header.

Create a template

Site Factory allows you to create site templates to apply. A template is created by extracting an existing site from your SharePoint environment.

Follow these steps to create your template:

• Create a SharePoint site of the same type as the target site to which you want to apply the template. Also, choose the same default language as the target site.
• Customize this site to set up your template
• Verify that you are a site administrator. If not, request this role from your SharePoint administrator
• Go to Site Factory in Jint Portal.
• Click "Extract a site."
• Enter a name for the template, the URL of the site to extract, and the SharePoint site category (team site or communication site), then confirm.

Template creation form

The extraction request is saved and displayed as "Extraction in progress." It will be processed by our Site Factory after potentially being placed on hold in the event of a high volume of requests. The extraction can take up to 30 minutes.

When the template extraction is complete, it appears in the list of available templates in the "Apply a template" section.

An error message is displayed if the extraction could not be completed. Due to the large volume of data, a connection issue may generate an error. If you receive an unclear error, we recommend restarting the extraction several times.

To resolve these errors, we recommend reading our article on Site Factory best practices and common scenarios.

Apply a template

Once you have created your templates, you can apply them to your sites.

Follow these steps to apply your template to a site:

• Verify that you are the administrator of the target site. If not, request this role from your SharePoint administrator.
• Go to the "Site copy" tab in Jint Portal > SharePoint > Site Factory.
• Choose the desired template.
• Select the target site to which the template will be applied.
  • The site type and default language must match those of the template for it to be applied.
• Click "Copy."

You can track the progress of the template application in the Site Factory history.

Warning : the site type (communication site or team site) used to create the template must be the same type as the target site.

Example: if your template site is a communication site, your target site must also be a communication site. The same applies to a team site.

To verify this: 

1. Click the gear icon in the upper-right corner of your page when you are on the site
2. Select Site information
3. If the Privacy settings field is present (see below), it is a team site. If it is absent, it is a communication site.

Site Factory limitations

Site Factory has limitations due to the complexity of SharePoint sites. A number of points must be considered:

• The template and the sites to which you apply the template must have the same default language
• Site Factory is not designed to process large volumes of data. It can copy templates containing pages, structured libraries, and a few documents, but you cannot duplicate an existing site and all its content. HTTP error 429 indicates that Site Factory was unable to handle the load.

For more information, we invite you to read our article dedicated to Site Factory best practices.