Introduction

When it comes to SharePoint, the most important feature is the ability to manage your documents from a central location with all these cool features like versioning, permissions, workflows and stuff.

Once you master the basics, you will find that SharePoint is a great application platform and can be used to build some extraordinary applications without any programming knowledge.

Back in 2007, Microsoft released 40+ free application templates for Windows SharePoint Services 3.0. Through a series of articles on EndUserSharePoint.com, I am going to analyze use cases and scenarios for these templates, and also try to provide you with some tips on how you can improve and adopt these templates for your company.

From a technical perspective, templates are grouped in: Site Admin and Server Admin template groups. Here are the pros and cons for both groups:

Template Group	Pros	Cons
Site Admin	Easy to deploy Can be used in a shared hosting environment	You must be a site admin to deploy these Less functionality than server admin templates
Server Admin	Provide more functionalities Multilingual	You must have direct access to your server in order to deploy these “System admin knowledge” required to deploy

Evaluating templates online

Before installing templates, it is always a better option to evaluate them on the web. Ian Morris has put up a great site featuring all 40 application templates. You can use the site to check screenshots and live demo of each template. Each time I need to check something about applications templates, Ian’s site is the first place I visit.

Microsoft also provides you with descriptions of Application Templates (see resources at the bottom of this article). This page is very useful to check if a template matches the problem you are trying to solve. You can also use these descriptions to learn more about templates.

Installing templates on-premise

Installing site templates is easy; you only need to upload the template files to site template document library.

Conclusion

In this article I gave a brief overview of application templates, in weeks to come we are going to talk more about the most interesting application templates.

Installation of server templates is bit more complicated and you need to have remote access to your server. In order to install templates follow these instructions.

Thanks to Natalya Voskresenskaya you can also streamline the deployment of server admin templates. She made a script to automate installation of 20 server admin templates.

Resources

• Application Templates for Windows SharePoint Services 3.0
• Descriptions of Application Templates for Windows SharePoint Services 3.0
• Get all 40 Application Templates available in English as a single download
• Application Templates – Online demo
• Fast Installation of Fabulous 40 templates

 

Author: Toni Frankola SharePoint Use Cases Toni started his Web adventure in late 90’s and has been working with various web technologies ever since.

Toni is leading project engagements and managing a team of consultants specializing in Microsoft technologies. His primary focus is on Microsoft Office SharePoint and Dynamics CRM. He works at Perpetuum Mobile, a Microsoft Gold Partner from Croatia.