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PSA: Are your customised site definitions supported?

We (Microsoft) have lots published guidance on customising SharePoint for your own specific needs. We provide lots of built-in site definitions for various purposes, but sometimes you need to tweak those to suit your own scenario. But are your tweaks supported?

Well that depends.

  • If you've modified a built-in site definition directly, you are in an unsupported state
  • If you've copied an existing site definition, then modified the copy, you're supported

Why is this important? Well, a couple of reasons.

One: we may want to release an update to an existing site definition as part of a service pack or feature pack. This will stomp all over your changes and no doubt you'll be an unhappy bunny about it.

Two: every so often a case trickles into support where a customer has tried to run an upgrade or migration, and it's failing because of a tweaked built-in site defintion. Eseentially, the upgrade program is utterly baffled that the site def doesn't just upgrade the way it expects. Yes, you will most likely have big problems upgrading a site in which built-in site definitions have been customised.

So you may find it prudent to check KB 898631  when planning custom site or area definitions:

Supported and unsupported scenarios for working with custom site definitions and custom area definitions in Windows SharePoint Services, in SharePoint Portal Server 2003, and in Office SharePoint Server 2007

PS: Premier Support here in Sydney IS HIRING. We're after SharePoint Support Engineers for both development and admin - please feel free to get in touch through the blog and I can get you referred. When I have a public link I'll update to reflect that.

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