Rediger

Variations in the SharePoint Add-in model

Important

SharePoint Add-ins reached end of life in SharePoint Online on April 2, 2026. Both SharePoint-hosted and provider-hosted Add-ins are retired and no longer work in SharePoint Online, including government clouds. Add-in development, deployment, and usage guidance is retained for historical reference and for applicable SharePoint Server scenarios, not for new SharePoint Online solutions.

SharePoint Server Add-ins deployed through an on-premises app catalog are not retired by this change. Acquiring SharePoint Add-ins from the public marketplace ended on April 2, 2026 for SharePoint Server.

This retirement does not retire SharePoint REST APIs, CSOM, JSOM, or SharePoint Framework (SPFx). For SharePoint Online, use SPFx for user interface extensions and Microsoft Entra ID for authentication to external applications. See the retirement announcement and Add-in migration guidance.

Summary

The approach you take to configure variations is different in the new SharePoint Add-in model than it was with Full Trust Code. In a typical Full Trust Code (FTC) / Farm Solution scenario, the SharePoint Server-side Object Model (Microsoft.SharePoint.Publishing.Variations) was used to configure variations, and features that executed the code were deployed via SharePoint Solutions.

In an SharePoint Add-in model scenario, you use the SharePoint Client-side Object Model (CSOM) or REST API to configure variations. This pattern is commonly referred to as the remote provisioning pattern.

High-level guidelines

As a rule of a thumb, we would like to provide the following high-level guidelines to configure variations in the new SharePoint Add-in model.

PnP samples

Applies to

  • Office 365 Multi Tenant (MT)
  • Office 365 Dedicated (D)
  • SharePoint 2013 on-premises