How to move site templates from SharePoint 2010 (on-premise) to SharePoint Online (Office 365)?

Question

I tried to migrate a site template from an on premise installation to SharePoint 2010 Online (Office 365). When I try to create a new site I get the following error:

The site template requires that the Feature {2acf27a5-XXXXX-xxxx...} be activated in the site collection.

I already know that a missing feature is the web analytics feature which is not available on SP Online.

Does anybody have a good guidance on how to get around these issue? Do I just need deactivate the feature on premise and save the template again? Or do I need import the site template .wsp into Visual Studio and edit the XML (eg. remove the required feature IDs)?

Answer 1

I've found that this is exceeedingly difficult. Many of the features which may be enabled in an "on premises" farm cannot be deactivated through the UI or even with Powershell. I went through this exercise just trying to move one of my demos which depended on virtually none of the SharePoint 2010 available features and ended up giving up because it was impossible to turn some of those features off.

Also consider the fact that you need to turn those features off in your existing farm, which may well be in use. This can cause really ugly ramifications becasue you can end up with all sorts of orphaned features and other "stuff".

It's possible that editing the .wsp manually will work, but you're basically on your own there. You would need to experiment because of the interdependencies between features, etc.

Answer 2

Deactivate the feature on your local instance and regenerate the template and you should be all set to create sites with it on Office 365.