Activating and Configuring the Extranet Collaboration Manager (ExCM) 2010 Feature Using PowerShell

by Matthew McBride

Extranet Collaboration Manager (ExCM) 2010 is activated at the Site Collection level. This is easily done in the Site Settings area of the User Interface (UI) for a single site:

But what if you were running ExCM on multiple Site Collections? Since it is licensed at the Web Frond End (WFE) level, you can install ExCM on as many Site Collections as you want. It would be very time consuming to go to each site, activate the feature, and then configure it. In a scenario like this, you can save time by using PowerShell to activate ExCM on each site and also setting some options (such as registration fields) at the global level in the web.config file. In addition, by using one of our custom scripts for ExCM we can activate Invitation Registrations and set their expiration length.

First, let’s activate the ExCM feature on our site using the SharePoint Management Shell. Here is the syntax:

Enable-SPFeature -Identity ExCM_Extranet -Url $URL

After running the command, I can now see the feature has been activated:

Now we can move on to enabling and configuring our invitation settings via PowerShell. By default, invitations are not enabled, so this is what we see under “Registration Settings:”

The utility we need can be downloaded from here:

http://aws-software-s3.sharepointsolutions.com.s3.amazonaws.com/products/support/ExCM2010/Set-ExCMInvitationRegistrationSettings.ps1

And the syntax is as follows:

.\Set-ExCMInvitationRegistrationSettings.ps1 -url http://siteurl -allowInvitationRegistration $true -invitationUrlZone "Default" -invitationExpirationLength 7

Here is what my command looks like:

If I go back and look at the Invitation Registration settings, I can see that it worked:

Now that we have the commands edited for our environment, we could easily activate ExCM and configure some common settings on numerous Site Collections very quickly.