My team was facing acute errors just about the delivery time. We approached MS India, freelancers, topic expects but so solution. In our case, I found out that this was a local environment issue rather than a generic issue which is why no one had any solution.
Environment: SharePoint 2010
Issue: we were getting error while creating a new site from a site template we had created. Our deliverable to the client was a site template.
Our resolution (steps):
1. Create a new “site template” without content.
2. Prepare a fresh installed SharePoint 2010 environment
3. Create a new site using the “site template” (WSP file) at the new SP portal
4. Now recreate or export/import all backend date like lists, documents, etc.
5. Create a new “site template” from the new SharePoint 2010 environment (which now has all artifacts)
6. Now deploy the site template and create a site using it on any SharePoint environment.
More details about the issue and it's resolution:
• Devs were able to export and successfully create new sites using the template until 2 weeks back
• Only things which changed during this time was that we installed a new third party SharePoint tools and webparts
• We were able to create a site template but it was failing to create a site on another site collection in absence of some missing components
• We were getting correlation error {e995e28b-9ba8-4668-9933-cf5c146d7a9f} which means we need to have “MobileExcelWebAccess” activated. We were not able to find how to activate this component.
• I then uninstalled the additional component (installed couple weeks back) and removed the webpart. I also used clean up tool (http://featureadmin.codeplex.com/) to remove some features. This did not resolve the problem
• I then tried to take full backup and restore on other site collection. I noticed that the webparts and features were cleaned but yet a part of back files.
• I then tried working with a fresh SharePoint environment which worked (as above).
Errors that we received while creating new sites using a custom template:
Error
An unexpected error has occurred.
Correlation ID: {C111a414-03fa-44b2-b9c8-f23ba0e0214f}
Error
The site template requires that the Feature {e995e28b-9ba8-4668-9933-cf5c146d7a9f} be activated in the site collection.
Correlation ID: {2e31b8c9-78a9-4a10-8779-539a811a83f5}