Turn on Developer Site in Office 365

Turn on Developer Site in Office 365

One of our task as SharePoint developers is SharePoint Apps development. It’s recommended approach by Microsoft, when we create solutions for Office 365 and to do this we need turn on Developer Site in Office 365. For this purpose Microsft provide to use  Office 365 Developer Subscription, and there we can create site colection, base on “developer site collection” template. Sometime we have to work we standard site, but when we check SharePoint site settings there’s no feature to turn on Developer Site in Office 365. Of course it’s very easy to do this if we run SharePoint on premise, but in case of cloud enviroment it’s not so easy. Or rather I should wrote it wasn’t… A few days ago I was looking for solution of some problem and I discovered great project on CodePlex, called SharePoint Client Browser for SharePoint 2010 and 2013. After download we get browser of our site and after log on we can see all possible features:

As you can we have all possible information in one place. And now something awesome. If you click with right mouse button on your site name, you will see option to run PowerShell with CSOM. That’s right!

Let me say it’s so simple to run PowerShell against Office 365 site… And let go back to our developer site. When we start PowerShell consoler for the first time we will get couple of information about a few available  parameters to use:

Now with this information we can just wrote a few lines of code:

$ctx.Load($ctx.Site);
$ctx.ExecuteQuery();
$guid = [System.Guid]”e374875e-06b6-11e0-b0fa-57f5dfd72085″
$ctx.Site.Features.Add($guid,$true,[Microsoft.SharePoint.Client.FeatureDefinitionScope]::None)
$ctx.ExecuteQuery();

Small remark. Those GUID is provided by Microsoft and it’s linked to Developer Site in Office 365.