Last weekend I read that the SharePoint Online Code-Based Sandbox solutions are going to be removed and you hoped on Monday this didn’t apply to your Office 365 tenant! Well in my client’s case it did.

From a support perspective, after having received a message in O365 tenant admin centre that the issue was detected and will be removed in approx. 30 days, we logged a Microsoft support call to ascertain which site collections were affected, to which the following was the response.

1. We were unable to pull a list of sites or site collections deployed based on code-based sandbox solution.

2. Such sites will remain online for another 30 days and even afterwards.

3. The code-based sandbox solutions will be de-activated after 30 days, which means new sites cannot be created based on these solutions post 30 days from now.

4. If you need such a solution to be activated after it was deactivated please reach us and we can temporarily activate the solution.

So not a very clear message!

The communication challenge here was the mannerism of the message received in our tenant without any warnings or any countdown, given that the blog article was published over 2 years ago and not many Office 365 deployments were in place compared to where we are today with astonishing growth of Office 365 adoption.

So unless you got your SharePoint Online Governance in place in which case you would know exactly what code-based sandbox solutions you have across your site collections then you need to carryout customisations health check to identify these code-based sandbox solutions inventory.

In our case, it appears that in the past there was migration of sites from SharePoint 2010, where by these Sandbox solutions would have come through!

However, your scenario may be different in that if you are managing Office 365 tenant and SharePoint happen to be something extra you manage. You will need to create and run powershell script to enumerate through all site collections in your tenant, identifying all the solutions and further identify which of those are code-behind sandbox solutions and assessing its impact on users.

It should be noted that this post does not apply to No-code sandbox solutions.

Hope this helps.

UPDATE 03 AUG 16: Useful SharePoint Community links to resolve your issue

OfficeDev PnP SharePoint Sandbox List Solutions From Tenant Script

http://sympmarc.com/2016/08/03/new-script-available-from-microsoft-pnp-generate-list-of-sandbox-solutions-from-sharepoint-online-tenant/

http://www.sharepointnutsandbolts.com/2016/08/sandbox-code-disabled-in-Office-365.html

-Chirag

Published by Chirag Patel @techChirag

Chirag is an independent Microsoft 365 consultant at Patel Consulting, and Microsoft MVP (Office & Apps Services), based in UK with more than 20 years of industry experience. He is also a BCS (British Computer Society) Member & Chartered IT Professional, Microsoft 365 Certified Enterprise Administrator Expert, MCT (Microsoft Certified Trainer) and TOGAF9 Certified Architect. He works with a wide variety of clients in many sectors, designing and implementing business collaboration, data and information management solutions and services based on Microsoft Teams, SharePoint and Microsoft 365 technologies, Power Platform to create business value for both themselves and their customers, including UK Microsoft Gold Partners with deployment, upgrade and migration services delivery. Chirag is an active Microsoft 365 community participant, frequent speaker at local and international events including Microsoft 365 Saturdays, Power Saturdays, SharePoint Saturdays, Collab365, TeamsFest, Modern Workplace Summit and Scottish Summit. You can follow Chirag on twitter at @techChirag. View all posts by Chirag Patel @techChirag