Mark Miller (End User SharePoint), Dessie Lunsford (The Elusive Calculated Column) and I were talking about putting together a series of articles on the fantastic 40 templates for SharePoint. Here’s what Dessie suggested we call the series:
“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!!!”
Here are mine experiences:
…For example Microsoft gave us 40 use cases (wss application templates) but every time we tried to use these, we ended-up creating everything from scratch. It is frustrating…
Agree? Disagree? Have you tried to use them? What’s your experience? I would like to hear some comments.
7 Responses
Well, some are pretty much useless, but we have found one (well, atleast one) that is worth paying attention to – Budgeting and Tracking of multiple Projects…
But yes, most of the others one installs are… well… bit off. User usualy start clicking around aimlessly, desperately searching for some meaning in the implementation, then, in last futile attempt to make some meaning in all this mess tries to read description of template again, wondering “what were they thinking – how should I use this?”… and… you go to the next. Or tea. Or coffie. Lots of cream and milk. And some Mocca, please. No more WSS for this morning, thank you.
I agree for the most part. Some of them do almost what I need, but need a little more customization. I’ve used the Room & Equipment Scheduling template and the Knowledge Base with some success.
It would help *tremendously* if they would simply release the source code to the custom code they wrote for the “server” templates, so we could see what they were doing and/or make some customizations. Why keep it a secret? There’s nothing to be that proud about with them. 🙂
I also hope MS considers taking a look at the things they had to write code to do and take the generic things (especially those in the common DLL that the templates share) and incorporate them into the next version of SharePoint. If they had to write code to do those things, it’s likely we have to write the same code, and it’s also likely a deficiency in SharePoint.
I want to use the “Business Performance Reporting” templates which uses infopath form as survey. Any experience with this one?
I tried using time card management in our office. However, the punch out is punching me….it needs to be clicked many times to get it working.
Shahid – we have had the same problem too. I set it up for consultants to track their time, and they swear they punch out, but it doesn’t register it.
Absolutely true. But I have found one which looks somewhat usable – Employee Training Template.
Others, even for the most simple day-to-say scenarios like bug-database are really use-less. Instead of making them generic and simple MS should have tried to create few but usable ones, which they themselves would use.
But anyways… that’s MS for you.
I totally agree with you. I used the employee training template and it’s full of bugs