What are Application templates
Application templates are out-of-the-box custom scenarios which are developed to address the needs and requirements of specific business processes or sets of tasks as in they can be used to create a dedicated site or workspace for a particular business process or task.
Application templates in WSS and MOSS are separated into two group of templates; Server Admin Templates and Site Admin Templates.
Server Admin Application Templates
These are created as site definitions and require administrator permissions on the server to install. Below is a list of these 20 templates with a brief description of their purpose.
- Absence Request and Vacation Schedule Management
A site for teams to share information on when team members will be away from the office and who to contact for issues. - Help Desk
A site for teams to submit and manage customer support issues. It provides lists to track service request history and includes a knowledge base. - Budgeting and Tracking Multiple Projects
A site for teams to track multiple projects. It provides lists to track general project information, project tasks, and project issues. - Inventory Tracking
A site to track inventory items, levels, sales, and orders. - Bug Database
A site for teams to track bugs in their shared software projects. - IT Team Workspace
A site for an IT team site to manage incoming issues, projects, and bugs. - Call Center
A site for teams to track customer support calls. It provides lists to track customers, service request history and includes a knowledge base. - Job Requisition and Interview Management
A site for teams to manage their job requisitions, candidates, and interviews. - Change Request Management
A site for teams to track change requests in multiple projects. It provides lists to track change requests, general project information, project tasks, project issues, and project risks. - Knowledge Base
A site to manage and create knowledge assets within an organization. - Compliance Process Support Site
A site for teams to help plan compliance processes. - Lending Library
A site to track the assets of a team lending library. - Contacts Management
A site for teams to track their shared contacts. - Physical Asset Tracking and Management
A site for teams to track their existing physical assets and manage the process of proposing new assets. - Document Library and Review
A site for teams to store documents and provide feedback on a per-version basis. - Project Tracking Workspace
A site that supports team collaboration on projects. This site includes Project Documents, Project Issues, Project Risks, and Project Deliverables lists which may be linked to tasks in Microsoft Office Project Server 2007. - Event Planning
A site for teams to plan and manage events like conferences. - Room and Equipment Reservations
A site for teams to manage the use of shared rooms and equipment. - Expense Reimbursement and Approval Site
A site for teams to submit and manage expense reports. - Sales Lead Pipeline
A site for sales teams to track contacts, accounts, leads, and opportunities.
Note: To install or remove a server admin template, you must have Administrator rights to both the Windows SharePoint
Services site and to the root of the server on which it is to be installed or removed.
Installation and removal are done via the 'Stsadm.exe' command-line utility located at
'%PROGRAMFILES%\Common files\Microsoft Shared\Web Server Extensions\12\Bin'
Site Admin Templates
These are custom templates which can be installed by individual site administrators in a template gallery without requiring farm administration access. Below is a list of these 20 templates
1. Board of Directors
The Board of Directors application template provides a single location for an external group of members to store and locate common documents such as quarterly reviews, shareholder meeting notes and annual strategy documents. The template also tracks tasks, issues and calendar items so board members have a single location to view information relevant to them
2. Business Performance Rating
The Business Performance Reporting application template helps organization managers track the satisfaction of customers through a combination of surveys and discussions. Surveys can be sent via Office InfoPath 2007 which are then consolidated by the template to give an overall response to a series of questions.
3. Case Management for Government Agencies
The Case Management for Government Agencies application template helps case managers track the status and tasks required to complete their work. When a case is created, standard tasks and documents are created which are modified based on the work each case manager has completed.
4. Classroom Management
The Classroom Management application template helps instructors and students organize and store information related to a particular class. The site includes document libraries to store assignments and lecture notes as well as calendars and announcement capability to enable communication from instructor to students.
5. Clinical Trial Initiation and Management
The Clinical Trial Initiation and Management application template helps teams manage the process of tracking clinical trial protocols, objective setting, subject selection and budget activities. The site provides useful Office Word 2007 templates as well as the capability to create, track and assign tasks and issues related to a particular clinical trial.
6. Competitive Analysis Site
The Competitive Analysis Site application template helps teams organize information about competitors and their products. The site provides useful Microsoft Office 2007 documents to perform SWOT and other useful competitive analysis techniques. Links to industry, company and product news can also be included to provide a single location for all competitive information.
7. Discussion Database
The Discussion Database application template provides a location where team members can create and reply to discussion topics. Discussions are organized by categories, which are created by a site manager, and can be linked to Office Outlook 2007 via an RSS feed.
8. Disputed Invoice Management
The Disputed Invoice Management application template helps accounts payable departments track open invoices including the potential savings associated with paying the invoice early. The site includes useful templates for analyzing the reasons invoices are being disputed as well as tracking who to contact for more information.
9. Employee Activities Site
The Employee Activities Site application template helps manage the creation and attendance of events for employees. Activity owners use the site to review proposals for new activities and create event calendar items. Employees use the site to sign up as well as track which activities they’ve attended in the past.
10. Employee Self-Service Benefits
The Employee Self-Service Benefits application template provides tools for an organization to inform employees about available benefits as well as enabling them to enroll for each benefit.
11. Employee Training Scheduling and Materials
The Employee Training Scheduling and Materials application template helps instructors and employees manage courses and related materials. Instructors can use the site to add new courses and organize course materials. Employees use the site to schedule attendance at a course, track courses they've attended and to provide feedback.
12. Equity Research
The Equity Research application template helps teams collaborate on researching stocks and other equities. It provides a central location for teams to store documents, post links, track news, and hold discussions related to the equities tracked by the site.
13. Integrated Marketing Campaign Tracking
The Integrated Marketing Campaign Tracking application template helps marketing managers track the implementation and success of outbound marketing activities. The template allows a manager to create marketing activities and track the results of those activities, such as responses generated and sales completed. The template contains multiple methods of analyzing the success of the campaigns including automated calculations and Office Excel 2007 templates for more detailed analyses.
14. Manufacturing Process Management
The Manufacturing Process Management application template helps teams to model and track manufacturing processes as well as tasks and issues that arise in the upkeep of these processes.
15. New Store Opening
The New Store Opening application template helps a team manage the opening of new store locations or re-modeling of existing store location. The site provides a single location to manage tasks, issues, and documents for all store opening processes, enabling end users to view relevant information and providing project managers insight across the entire project.
16. Product and Marketing Requirements Planning
The Product and Marketing Requirements Planning application template enables teams to manage the process of collecting and documenting requirements for new products. The site provides several Microsoft Office 2007 templates providing useful techniques for Marketing, Product and Steering committee actions as well as a template for meeting notes and financial information
17. Request for Proposal
The Request for Proposal application template helps manage the process of creating and releasing an initial RFP, collecting submissions of proposals and formally accepting the selected proposal from amongst those submitted. The site also helps simplify the process of notifying individuals about the status of the RFP and submitted proposals.
18. Sports League
The Sports League Site application template helps an intra-company league administrator manage a baseball league. The site tracks team information, players, captains and scheduled team activities such as games, practices and social events. Team members can enter in game results and perform analysis at a team, game or individual player level. The site also enables discussions between league members through a League Discussion board.
19. Team Work Site
The Team Work Site application template provides a place where project teams can upload background documents, track scheduled calendar events and submit action items that result from team meetings. The site also tracks the creation and purpose of "sub-teams" as well as enables discussion of topics created by members of the team.
20. Timecard Management
The Timecard Management application template helps teams track hours spent working on various projects. The site enables team members to "punch in" on a particular project and "punch out" when they cease work. The system automatically generates the time worked by project, and can show managers who is working on a particular project, total hours versus budgeted time and the details of who worked on a each project entered into the site.
Downloads
Download the files and extract them to a folder on your local system say 'C:\Fab40' directory.
Listed below are the steps to install and deploy the WSPs and STPs to your SharePoint farm. Additionally, you can use the commands to create a batch file that will help you expedite the installation and deployment of Server Admin and Site Admin Templates.
I have created a text file with the required set of commands for automating the installation and deployment of the templates. Change the file extension from ‘.txt’ to ‘.bat’ and then run the executable to complete the installation.
Install the Application Template Core Solution
1. Before installing a server admin template, you must first download and install the Application Template Core solution called ApplicationTemplateCore.wsp.
2. After downloading the solution, double click on the 'exe' to extract the files to a location on the server; e.g. 'C:\Fab40'
3. Via command line, run "Stsadm -o addsolution -filename "C:\Fab40\ApplicationTemplateCore.wsp".
4. Next, run "Stsadm -o deploysolution -name ApplicationTemplateCore.wsp -allowgacdeployment -immediate".
Note:
Additional attributes may be required based on your Windows SharePoint Services configuration like
Single Server: [-local | -time <time to deploy at>]
Farm : [-immediate | -time <time to deploy at>]
To see the list of attributes, run Stsadm -help deploysolution or visit http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc288449(office.12).aspx
5. Run ‘Stsadm -o copyappbincontent‘
6. To check the deployment status, browse to Central Administration > Operations tab > Solution management under Global Configuration. The solution(s) will be marked as Globally Deployed.
Install a template
1. Download the template you want to install to the server.
2. Double-click the .exe file to extract the files to a location on the server; e.g. 'C:\Fab40' .
3. Via command line, run "Stsadm -o addsolution -filename "C:\Fab40\\<template_name>.wsp", where <template_name>.wsp is the .wsp file for your template.
4. Next, run "Stsadm -o deploysolution -name <template_name>.wsp -allowgacdeployment"
Note:
Additional attributes may be required based on your Windows SharePoint Services configuration like
Single Server : [-local | -time <time to deploy at>]
Farm : [-immediate | -time <time to deploy at>]
To see the list of attributes, run ‘Stsadm -help deploysolution’ or visit http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc288449(office.12).aspx
5. To check the deployment status, browse to Central Administration > Operations tab > Solution management under Global Configuration. The solution(s) will be marked as Globally Deployed.
6. Run IISreset from the command line.
Using the new templates to create a new site
To create a new site, follow these steps
- From the Site Actions drop-down menu in the top right, select Site Settings.
- Under the Site Administration section, select 'Create Site' to create a new site using a site template.
- Complete the new SharePoint site information.
- In the Template Selection section, we will now have the new templates available under the “Application Templates” and “Custom” tabs.
- All deployed templates will be listed in this tab.
- Select the template to use for this site and click Create.
- A site will now be created using the chosen template.
Removing a template
This process will not remove any sites that were already created using the template. It will only prevent users from creating new sites based on the template. The Application Template Core solution must remain installed and deployed for other server admin templates to be installed.
1. Removing a solution is done via the ‘Stsadm’ command line utility.
2. To retract a solution from being available to SharePoint sites, run ‘Stsadm -o retractsolution -name <template_name>.wsp’ where <template_name>.wsp is the .wsp file for your template.
To see a list of optional attributes available with this command, run ‘Stsadm -help retractsolution’ or visit http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc287669(office.12).aspx
3. To remove a solution from the server, run ‘Stsadm -o deletesolution -name <template_name>.wsp’
To see a list of optional attributes available with this command, run ‘Stsadm -help deletesolution’ or visit http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc288697(office.12).aspx
4. The application template is now unavailable to SharePoint sites and the solution has been removed from the solution store.
Note:
You must be a Farm administrator to complete the installation and once you do these templates will be universally available. You will now have two new tabs called ‘Application Templates’ and ‘Custom’ under the ‘Template Selection’ section when you create a new site.
In WSS, a timer job called Usage Analysis, runs on each WFE and is responsible for parsing the usage log files and updating the information in the site’s content DB. 
