This is something that came up at a client’s site last week, which I thought should be a trivial problem to solve. As always, it ended up being a little more complex than I originally anticipated. So everyone knows that a SharePoint solution can either be globally scoped, meaning that all web applications in the farm can leverage it, or it can be scoped at a specific web application. But what about features contained within these solutions?

Assume you have a custom .WSP solution that contains 1 feature and which is scoped for your web application on port 81 (e.g. http://localhost:81). One would assume that by default, if the solution is only made available to the Web Application on port 81 (scoped at web app level) that it would be the same for the feature contained within it, meaning that this feature, assuming it it scoped at the site collection level, would only be accessible by site collections within the Web Application contained in the Web Application on port 81. Well, in fact it is not. A feature is always made available to all web applications in a farm, even if its associated solution is targeted at a unique web application.

Read More Scoping a SharePoint Feature for a Specific Web Application