Looking for Feedback: Fabulous 40 Templates
I just received a request from Tom at Microsoft to give some feedback on the Fabulous 40 Templates. Instead of me becoming a one man hit squad, I figured I’d ask you: What’s your experience with the Fabulous 40 Templates?
Here’s Tom’s original question:
Do you have any concrete feedback you can send me on the Fab 40 templates? For example, issues people are having with each template, ways to improve, etc. (especially the most popular/requested templates).
I’m going to be meeting with the SPD PMs in the next week or two to discuss the distribution of the templates in 2010. While our goal won’t be on upgrading/improving the templates, I’d like to pass along some real user feedback from you and others who frequently discuss the Fab 40 on their sites.
I had a discussion with Dessie Lunsford of “Taming the Elusive Calculated Column” fame a while back, and this is what he had to say about them:
““The somewhat cumbersome, partially functional, 40-count stab at providing what may or may not be useful, templates available for download – use at your own risk and – don’t blame us if you delete them because they gave you a headache!!!”
So you’ve tried them. What do you think? Would you recommend them? Use them? Rework them? What should the 2010 team be looking to provide?
The floor is yours. Give it your best shot.
Dessie said it best, I totally agree!
The number one complaint I hear from customers about the templates is that they are very hard to customize. I think the marketing around them paints them as a full solution for everyone, when in fact, they should be considered only a starting point.
Once you do dive into them, some of the underlying constructs are just darn difficult to figure out, so better documentation on how each is constructed would be great. The Room and Equipment Reservations Application Template comes to mind, as I had to decipher it recently. The table structures and the DVWP to display them are just very strangely built. There’s always more than one way to accomplish things, but that one seems very odd to me. (I can dig out the specifics if it is helpful.)
Many of the templates use the trusty DVWP and workflows, which is great, but most average users aren’t going to have any idea what’s under the hood even with documentation. So there’s the rub: you want to give folks something useful, but it can’t be too complex, or it won’t be useful.
M.
I agree with Marc 100%
I echo @Marc. The templates are never going to perfectly fit a problem, so you’re always going to have to do some customizing. The hardest part is figuring out how the template was constructed so you can make your customizations. Detailed documentation on the templates would be very helpful.
Along the same lines as Marc – regarding all of the templates…make them easier to customize. They are supposed to be a “starting point” but are difficult to change. Little adjustments such as adding a column to a list that is used, for example should be simple to do and documented.
If there are workflows involved, they should be documented or at minimum they should be apparent to the person setting up the template. We have had people set up templates and suddenly get emails that caught them off-guard because they didn’t even know there was a workflow associated.
I suggest putting a How-to document in the default library/list that loads with the template. The template features could be documented there as well as some common “how-to” topics for modifying things.
The Most Popular templates from my point of view are:
Help Desk – for tracking requests within departments, always customized to fit that scenario
Knowledge Base – small companies want this to centralize content, but want a different entry point and usually customize columns
tony
Comments so far hit it on the head.
Partially functional. Perhaps a starting point for own customization. Yet so strangely developed that some could not be modified or understood. Didn’t work as a model/example of what could or should be done for your own customizations… even after we figured out using SPD might be necessary.
Solution – Decide what they are. Usable out of box or examples of customization. Provide better documentation and instruction either way. Nothing elaborate; just something. Use them as the examples for some of the training video’s and such that MS did for users or developers. In other words integrate the effort with others.
Thanks for asking!
I’m sure you are well aware of the work I’ve done on the Employee Training template. The solutions are half baked and serve as a roadmap for what can be done. They all require extensive rework or bug fix to make them truely usable. Employee training took several months and many revisions to meet our internal needs.
I think if the PMs want to continue to provide these, better documentation with them is a must as well as getting the tempaltes “right” in terms of actual business needs. I understand that is up for interpretation and varies from company to company.
I will also echo @Marc – The majority of our customers tend to be very curios about the fab 40 but are later disappointed when they this not really suit them outright, they can rarely adapt these templates themselves and tend to give up an forget about this fab 40. Easier and more customizable templates would do it!
I agree with what everyone has said so far. I have always looked at them as a starting point, and have done some pretty decent things with the call center/help desk templates, such as creating a fairly robust Work Order Application, but once was all said and done there were a lot of changes made. Documentation would be key as they all seem to use different approaches to getting the job done.
1. It’s important to make them easy to customize for sure (Echo of what is stated here)
2. Better documentation (again echo of what is stated here)
3. Make them codeplex projects with full info and LET the community try and improve them. I bet if you made it simple/easy to package and improve you would get constantly evolving templates from our wonderful community of dedicated SharePoint individuals. So base it on a visual studio solution that publishes a wsp etc.
Those are my thoughts,
Richard Harbridge
Nice for demonstrating some of the possibilities, and they are also good learning tools for beginners. Hope to see more of them for 2010, with better documentation of course :)
Thank you all for these great comments! So they don’t always fit the needs of the user, they’re difficult to customize, and they lack documentation. All good points.
What about usability, user experience, site navigation? For the situations where they do work out for users, is it hard to train people on them?
Template design aside, are the scenarios covered? Is there a template you’d like to suggest?
Thanks!
Tom
The navigation has been fine in my experience, any issues can be fixed by modifying the left nav or using the publishing infrastructure to hone to your needs.
The usabiliy and user experience has been degraded due to the inherant issues with some of the templates. If those issues were resolved, then those would lessen and get greater user buy in.
With the new video/media libraries in 2010, a multimedia site template would be a great addition. This seems to be an area that businesses can struggle with.
Ahh yes, I remember that quote :)
It was after a particularly painful stab (once again) at using something other than the default “Team site” template to tackle a group’s need.
The main issue I’ve always had with these templates is the lack of documentation on how to duplicate them, and/or modify them. I appreciate the work put into developing them as free templates for everyone to use, but in the end, I wind up using them as more of a model, or “here’s an example of what you ‘could’ do”, rather than actually using them to power a site.
Unfortunately, our normal procedure involves looking through the templates to get some ideas, then building out the functionality from scratch from the default “Team Site” template.
Eric and I did a large amount of work on the “Employee Training” template (he did an amazing amount of work picking up where I left off to produce his solution), but I’ve never had the time to really get into all the rest of them to make them better.
With the upcoming enhancements in SP2010, things like having template-locked workflows will be a thing of the past (one of the major pains of the existing “Fab-40″ that use workflows), and I hope they re-evaluate all of these templates and push in some extra goodies to make them more worthwhile…I’d love to be able to use them (for me, their current state just doesn’t make it a neccessity).
- Dessie
All great comments but I had to re-work some to meet our needs. I work in a Army hospital and one thing I notice, MS forgets about the military. I know in the Army SharePoint is used in almost every base and unit. The Army Medical Command is ‘HOT’ in having every ‘Internet and Intranet’ using SharePoint. How about MS give us a ‘bone’ and ask us the age old question, “How do you do you job? This is what SharePoint can do for you.”
Most of the shortcomings have already been detailed in previous comments and I’m pretty much in agreement. They definitely are too difficult to figure out in order to customise effectively.
One example which particularly irks me is that many of the “Admin” templates deploy SPD workflows with lists using some MS-specific code in the solution. Making this technique public would help a lot of template developers.
As a CIO, I saw the F40 as a set of SharePoint examples that challenged the way we do solution development. Rather than looking at them from a “Glass half empty” perspective by listing what is missing, I saw the set as an impressive (somewhat) ready group of templates that demonstrated practical examples of what SharePoint could do if we followed the practices developed by Microsoft. It also provides for a very interesting forum for the CIO or business analysts to ask questions such as “Why can’t we do it this way rather that the traditional .NET practices we are using now”. SharePoint is a disruptive technology that will require the development community to rethink many of the traditional practices and principals that have been using over the years.
As for 2010, I would like to see more of these as reusable modules in the context of SharePoint as composite development environment.
How about another positive note? I find the templates useful as a model for what I’m being asked for. We have several of them implemented on our Intranet, and since our only “customization” is the selection of a different theme, I don’t have to spend any time with customizing the templates. I’ve had some training, but for me, this site (EndUserSharePoint.com) and the templates are my constant reference for figuring out “how tos”.
I do wish they would link to the Microsoft SharePoint forums (http://social.technet.microsoft.com/Forums/en-US/category/sharepoint) from pages that refer to the templates. I usually find the answers to my issues there.
Please either make them extensible, repeatable, flexible or let them die with sp2007.
Perhaps a less corny name wouldn’t be so bad either :)
The best thing about them was the bit of documentation about how they were built. I didn’t always agree with how they’d been done, but it was interesting and thought provoking to see other approaches.
Frankly, given how no two companies want the same things, I doubt that they can be improved that much. The best might be more of a description about how (and why) they were built that way.
Or more ‘how to build’ type articles from MS – at the moment, many (though not all) of the best ones on technet are written by non-MS developers.
Good documentation on how assign permissions and roles for each of these application templates would be useful.
I would like to see the customised “features” for each site packaged up as modules and a “Solution” be a series of modules configured to suit a particular scenario. This way, the modules could be used in other webs or more easily repurposed…
Oh yeah, there needs to be 50 templates as well. There was 30 for 2003, 40 for 2007…
Patterns are good :)
I would love to see a business problem presented, then a solution devised by creative use/adaptation of one of the templates.
We at Office Talk also had the same issues with the strange way the 40 Templates were written and especially their liking for InfoPath. That just seemed to be written by people who had no experience of real business needs. So last year we developed a bundle of 10 Department Templates ourselves which have been good sellers. Each one kept simple so it would work on either WSS or MOSS and yet still do the routine jobs that the Department it was designed for would do. For example a ‘IT Hardware Inventory’, ”Approved Software List’ and ‘IT Helpdesk’ on the IT Department one.
http://www.office-talk.com/index.php?id=99
These have been so popular that I can currently finishing the 2010 versions of each of these templates. So if anybody is interested just shout.
Oh, and if you haven’t already got one we are still giving away World Cup 2010 Templates for both SharePoint 2010 and 2007. Just email me on [email protected] and tell me which one you want.
Andy- I visited your site and wanted to see some screenshots or functionality insights for the templates (in aprticular the Project Management one) and could not find anything other than the image of the Quick Launch. Is more available?
Nancy – I’ve got a ping into Andy to see if I can setup a demo site with the templates so we can all have a look. — Mark
Find out Fab 40 templates for MOSS 2010 at
http://microsofttechnologies.blogspot.com/2010/07/fab40-for-moss-2010.html
OR
download it from
http://techsolutions.net/Blog/tabid/65/EntryId/17/Fab-40-Templates-for-MOSS-2010.aspx