SharePoint 2016 Central Admin - Upgrade And Migration - Enable Features On Existing Sites

When you click on the "Enable Features on Existing Sites" link, you land on the following page. This page will let you enable the Enterprise features for all existing site collections in SharePoint farm. There are 2 possible views for this page, if you are trying to enable the enterprise features on existing site collection the first time, then you will see this page.


But if you have already enabled the Enterprise features on existing site collections, then you will see the following page, which has a message with a time stamp when you last enabled it.


Enable Features on Existing Sites page’s direct link - /_admin/enablefeatures.aspx

There is a situation, when Krossfarm’s administrator converts the SharePoint Server standard edition to enterprise edition and also enables the enterprise features in the farm. But the issue is, it only enables the features for newly provisioned sites. So now, we want to enable the enterprise features set on existing site collections.

Another scenario is, when you have moved the site collections from Standard installation farm to enterprise installation farm.

You have to plan this activity during the off-peak hours, as if you have a lot of site collections & sites on which this features set is going to enable then it will affect the SharePoint farm performance.

Enable features on existing sites

Please follow the below steps to enable the enterprise features set on all existing sites collections in the farm.

  • Login to Central admin with account member of farm administrator group and also local admin on the server.
  • Go to the Upgrade and Migration -> Click on Enable features on existing sites.
  • On this page, please

    1. Check the Box “Enable All Sites in this installation to use the following set of features.
    2. Click OK.



  • This will take several minutes depending upon the number of sites which requested this features set.
  • Now you will see a screen, which will display the Features Enabling Status. Initially it will display the status as



  • This page will auto refresh in short interval, next you will see the number of web application, site collections and sites on which this operation is being processed.



  • Once it completed then you will see the following successful message.


  • Click Close.
  • Great, now All of our sites in the SharePoint farm having the enterprise features set.

If you go back to Enable Features on existing sites, you will notice one thing. A message which will say: “The last successful attempt at enabling features on existing sites completed at 2/26/2017 7:44:32PM”. This page also gives you a short history.


This concludes this article, where we learned how to enable the enterprise features on existing SharePoint Server standard installation.

Keep reading and enjoy SharePoint.

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