Oh how temperamental SharePoint can beat times. Here’s a quick tip.
Lets say you have a neat little Office 365 site collection you have customised, without activating publishing features, you have added some free third party apps from the SharePoint store, say the twitter app or something similar. Then you want to save this as a template, and you go to the usual site settings location and the beast isn’t there, and it was there the other day.
To troubleshoot, you will probably first remove as many customisations as you can, I’d recommend starting with the twitter app. Some third party apps cannot be saved in template, and good ol’ SharePoint doesn’t exactly tell us why we can’t do certain things. So you’ve removed the twitter app, but still the link is not available. Don’t go and reset everything without checking the site options parameter in SharePoint Designer.
The site has a parameter SaveSiteAsATemplateEnabled that is set to true until you do something (adding the twitter app) to make it switch to false. When you remove the twitter app, you would expect the paramater to change back to true. Wrong! It doesn’t automatically do this.
Open the site in SharePoint Designer, in the home page, Click on “Site Options”, you will get prompt, In the “Parameters” Tab, you can find “SaveSiteAsTempalteEnabled”, set it to true.
Apply your change and refresh the site. You will be able to see the link to save the site as a template. If you still cannot save it as a template, the error message might be a little more informative as to why. Just remove the other offending items and check the parameter, and go for it again.
This is your captain speaking…Over and out
Captain Of Sharepoint 