Incorporating Your SharePoint Design in a Custom Process Template

You now have a choice: You can customize each site on a one-by-one basis or you can save your work as a SharePoint site template and associate it to your process template. The latter option makes sense if you are planning to reuse a process template repeatedly. It saves you from having to take the manual steps to customize the look and feel after creating each project portal. Here are the steps to create a site template file.

1. Open your customized team portal.

2. Click Site Settings.

3. Click Go to Site Administration on the Administration menu.

4. Under Management and Statistics, click Save Site as Template.

5. You will now have the option of creating a new file name for your custom template (filename.stp). You can also add in a template title and description.

   Important

   We recommend that you omit any spaces from your template file name.

6. There is a check box on the form that says Include content. This will include all the files that are currently part of your team portal. If you think that you will reuse all the same files on the portal every time you create a Team Project, click the check box. Otherwise, leave it unchecked.

7. Your template has now been saved.

Here are the instructions to obtain a copy of the site template as a .stp file. The .stp file is actually a .cab (Cabinet) file that contains an XML manifest describing the structure of the site and a collection of compressed files with your template's assets. Follow these steps:

1. From the home page of your portal, click Site Settings.

2. Under Administration, click Go to Site Administration.

3. Under Site Collection Galleries, click Manage site Template Gallery.

4. Click your template and download the .stp file to your C:\ drive.

5. Now, you need to make SharePoint recognize the new template and modify the process template. Assuming that you put your custom .stp file in the root of the C:\ drive, type the following command using the command prompt and hit Enter:

    > cd C:\ 

6. Then type the following to add the custom site template to Team Foundation Server:

    > "C:\Program Files\Common Files\Microsoft Shared\web server extensions\60\bin\stsadm.exe" -o addtemplate -filename mycustomtemplate.stp -title customtemplate 

In the preceding example, the file name for your custom template is mycustomtemplate.stp. You also designated customtemplate as the identifying title for the template. The title is quite important, as it is used to link the site template to your process template. Once your site template has been added, all you need to do is to make a small customization in your process template.

Integrating a Site Template within a Process Template

At this point, all you need to do is link the process template to the site template. Here are the steps to integrate both together.

1. Download a copy of a process template to your desktop by clicking on Team⇨Team Foundation Server Settings⇨Process Template Manager. From the Manager, select MSF for Agile Software Development and click the Download button. Once downloaded, open the process template folder.

2. Open the Windows SharePoint Services folder and edit WssTasks.xml in your favorite XML editor.

3. Update this site node, changing the template to your custom template title. For example:

    <site template="customtemplate" language="1033" /> 

4. Upload your customized process template. (You can do this by using the Upload feature of the Process Template Manager - see Chapter 6 for more details.) Before you do that, you may want to rename the title of the process.

Now every time you create a new Team Project using your custom process, a Team Portal will be generated with your custom logo and colors.

Verifying Your Portal Customizations

The best way to check your custom SharePoint setting is by creating a brand-new project incorporating your custom process template. To test your customized process template, use the following steps:

1. Upload your custom process template to the Team Foundation Server (Team⇨Team Foundation Server Settings⇨Process Template Manager. Then click the Upload button and navigate to your process template).

2. Create a new Team Project using your template.

3. Select the Show Project Portal option by right-clicking on your Team Project within the Team Explorer window.

4. Select the Documents and List option at the top of your project portal.

5. Click Document Libraries to see whether they were properly created.

6. You can then click individual files to determine whether they are located in the right document libraries.