SharePoint 2016 Central Admin - System Settings - Manage Farm Solution - Part One

When you click on the "Manage Farm Solution" link, you are landed on Solution Management page. This page gives an option to the SharePoint Administrator to manage the solutions which are deployed to farm level, or the Admin can also deploy the new solutions. If no solution is deployed to the farm, then you will get the following page.

Or if some solutions are deployed to farm, then you will get something like this.


Manage Farm Solution page’s direct link - /_admin/Solutions.aspx

Farm solutions are installed to the solution store of a farm by a farm administrator. The components in the solution can, and usually do, run in full trust, and no resource usage restrictions are placed on them.

As a SharePoint Administrator, we often want to know

1. what are the solutions deployed to the farm, on which web application they are deployed, what are their status, and on which servers they are installed?
2. Sometimes, we want to deploy the new solutions in the farm or retract a solution from a web app or completely remove it from farm.

In this article, I will try to explain the 1^st part of the question and in the next article, we will explain deployment and retraction part.

In this article, we will walk through the steps on how we can get the information about a solution which is added to the farm via Central Admin. We can do the same via PowerShell but that’s not the scope of this article.

To get the solution information

Please follow the below steps to get the information about the solutions.

• Login to Central Admin with account that is a member of farm administrator group and also local admin on the Server.
• Go to the System Settings > Manage Farm solutions.
• On this page, you will get the following information.
  
  
  1. Name
     In this column, you will see the name of the solutions (wsp) file.
     
     
  2. Status
     In this column, you will see the status of the solution, there are couple of possible status
     
     
     • Deployed if solution is deployed to a web application(s)
     • Deploying you get this status during the deployment of the solution for a short time
     • Not deployed if solution is added to the farm but not deployed to the farm
     • Retracting You will get this solution during the retraction of the solution.
     • Error If there is any error then you will see this status.
       
       
  3. Deployed to
     This column will give the information about the solution. If solution’s status is “not deployed”, then you will see “None” here; But if the solution’s status is deployed, then you will see Web Application Url where it is deployed.
     
     
     
     
• Now, to get more information about a specific solution, click on the name of the solution.
  
  
  
  
• On the next page, we will see properties of a said solution.
  
  
  1. Name - This will tell you the name of the wsp i.e. bulkpropertieseditor16.3.wsp
  2. Type - This will tell you the type of solution. i.e. Core Solution
  3. Contains Web Application Resource - This property will tell us whether the solution contains any web application-specific resources to deploy. i.e. Yes
  4. Contains Global Asembly -  If solution is deployed to Global Asembly, then the value is Yes. i.e. YES
  5. Contains Code Access Security Policy  - If solution contains Code Access Security, then value is Yes otherwise no. I.e. No
  6. Deployment Server Type
  7. Deployment Status - This proptery will give the information about deployment status either it is deployed or not deployed. I.e. Deployed
  8. Deployed To - In this, we will see all the web application where this solution deployed. i.e. http//kf-sp.krossfarm.com6200/; http//kf-sp40001/; https//team.krossfarm.com/
  9. Last Operation Result - It will display the message of the last operation and whether it's deployed sucessfully or retracted. I.e. The solution was successfully deployed.
  10. Last Operation Details - It will show the details of last operation whether it is deploying the solution to web app and on which server it deployed it. i.e. KF-SP http//kf-sp40001/ The solution was successfully deployed.
  11. Last Operation Time - This will tell us the date and time of last action. i.e. 3/13/2017 745 PM
      
      
      
      
• Now, if you want to go back, then click "Back to solution" link and go back to the Solution Management page.

In this article, we learned how we can get the information about a solution which is deployed to SharePoint farm using the Central admin web application. In part 2 of this article, we will explain how to deploy a solution and how to retract it.