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SharePoint has many useful features in its environment that are highly important for storing data, optimizing its usage, and accessing it in minimum time. One such important feature is SharePoint Solutions that are packaged through a solution package (WSP). Such solutions packages can be created through Visual Studio for a better SharePoint organization and creation and deployment of such packages.
A solution package combines multiple SharePoint features into a single file and lets you deploy directly to SharePoint Server.
For example, A contact list can contain some elements like list instance and list definition. You can create a separate feature having these elements and save them in a SharePoint Server package (WSP).
There are several SharePoint tools to manage and deploy the packages-
The Solution Explorer allows the user to navigate and handle the SharePoint project files. The context menu of solution explorer has special features to add Features, Feature Resources, and Feature event receivers. The user can also open several feature designers and package designers to create, deploy, and manage the packages.
The Packaging Explorer is a window tool that collects the SharePoint files into packages. There is a simple hierarchical view of the complete package, project items, features, and files. The essential tasks in the packaging explorer are following-
With the help of all these tools, you can create the WSP files and use them accordingly. These packages will have complete information on the features and the functionality. It can also contain site services, definitions, and other custom features. You can also download the WSP files and can reuse them again to a different SharePoint account. If you have the backup of the SharePoint account data, then you can go ahead in saving the WSP file.
NOTE
You can get the complete path of the Solution package at the Solution Management of Central Administration page.
Apart from WSP backup, there are many tasks SharePoint administrators need to perform, like data backup, migration, etc. When you want to backup content or migrate content to SharePoint from another platform, you can take the professional assistance of Kernel Migrator for SharePoint. SharePoint Migration software has all the features to migrate the complete content, their metadata, permissions, and other properties. This is a complete tool for SharePoint migrations and backups.
I am using these SharePoint tools for the management of packages and each tool is quite good to deploy the WSP packages. Great easy-to-use features in the tools.