Understanding and Working with the SharePoint Site Templates

In SharePoint, whenever you create a new site, you start with a template, which has predefined components including a home page, lists and libraries, customized Web Parts, features, and content types that anticipate how you will use the site and that reflect its possible requirements. It’s left to you to determine your requirements (as mentioned in the section “Site Management Overview”). So which template should you choose? Obviously, to cut down on work, the key is to select a template with as many of the components you need for your situation. You can then modify it to fit your requirements and save it to use on future sites. For example, to create a site template for your company’s projects, you can start with the team site template, which has built-in management components, and then add a list that tracks timelines and milestones for the project, as well as content types for project management and reporting. You can then save your site as a template and call it Standard Project Management Site so users will have all the elements they need to work on the site.

If you are responsible for a SharePoint site, remember the following timesaving tips in creating customized templates for your site:

• Identify the key templates your organization will need.   Anticipating your users’ needs prevents them from creating their own templates.

• Try not to create too many templates.   Too many templates are difficult to manage, and will not aid users in intuitively knowing which template to use.

• Make sure that your template is an adequate starting point.   Having too few or too many elements will frustrate a user and cause them to either create their own template or spend too much time fixing your template.

• Create sites from a consistent set of templates with common interface elements and component names.   This helps drive user adoption and overall acceptance of the environment.

If you create a site based on an existing site template, SharePoint offers several template categories:

• Collaboration:   Helps teams work toward a common goal or share information on a common topic in a central location. Sites from these templates are very active because team members perform their daily work on them. These templates are geared heavily for team environments featuring storage locations for documents, blog posts, or wiki pages.

• Meeting:   Allows a team to communicate on a specific event or meeting. Templates have elements commonly used for meetings, such as lists to track agendas, meeting minutes, or location details.

• Enterprise:   Focuses on the information organizations require from an intranet, such as reporting, search, and personalization. You can use them on their own or through other templates, such as the Collaboration Publishing site, which is the corporate intranet starting template.

• Publishing:   For publishing information on either an intranet or Internet. These templates have specific workflow processes enabled so you can create content and have it reviewed and approved before it’s visible to others in the organization. In addition, certain features make publishing images and information much easier for non-developers and content owners.

• Custom:   You save modifications you make to the other templates in this table as templates. These serve as excellent starting points for future sites. Once you create them, these templates appear under the Custom tab, as shown in Figure 8-17.

  
  Figure 8-17

The following sections cover each category of templates and help identify which template you should use as a starting point for creating your business solutions.

Working with Collaboration Templates and Sites

In SharePoint, the term collaboration is often used to describe sites and activities that focus on the sharing of information. SharePoint offers five sites under its Collaboration Sites tab that encourage and facilitate information sharing, which in turn improves how teams work together. These sites include:

• Team Site:   Contains many of the common elements used by teams including document library, tasks list, and links list.

• Blank Site:   Starts with no list or libraries and can be a clean slate for a team looking to create a collaborative site with the items that are unique to it.

• Document Workspace:   Used by the system to generate a workspace based on a document and can also be created by a site manager.

• Blog:   A simple news site that allows certain users to post stories and other users to respond to their ideas by posting comments.

• Wiki Site:   Wiki stands for the term “quick” and provides an informal location for teams to collaborate around a common idea without requiring formalized processes for content editing or reviewing.

This section discusses each site and how to work with them to create the collaboration site that’s right for you.

Team Site

You created a site using this template when you followed the steps in the “Create a New Site Using the Team Site Template” Try It Out earlier in the chapter. The Team Site template contains the elements that teams need in a collaborative work environment, including the following that help schedule, organize information, and communicate:

Open table as spreadsheet

Category	Elements
Home Page Web Parts	Announcements Web Part Calendar Web Part Links Web Part Site Image Web Part
Libraries	Form Templates Shared Documents
Lists	Announcements Calendar Links Tasks Team Discussion

Blank Site

The Blank Site template is suited for those who require a collaborative area for their team, but don’t want all the items in the team site template or perhaps want a slightly different configuration than the team site. This template doesn’t contain lists or libraries. The only Web Part in the home page is the Site Image Web Part, which has the Windows SharePoint Services logo as shown in Figure 8-18.

Figure 8-18

If you want to create a team template from scratch, or if you want to create your own lists and libraries and other elements, this template is ideal for your purposes. The process for creating a blank site is exactly the same as that for a team site (see the “Create a New Site Using the Team Site Template” Try It Out earlier in the chapter).

Document Workspace

The team site and blank site templates are perfect for environments where people collaborate regularly on a specific project or customer. But what if your group needs to collaborate on a very specific document or deliverable that has its own set of communication and collaboration requirements?

The document workspace has collaboration lists and functionality related to the development of a specific document. You can create this site using the steps in the “Create a New Site Using the Team Site Template” Try It Out. You can also Create a Document Workspace from a Document or file that resides in a document library, as shown in the next Try It Out.

When you generate a document workspace using either of the aforementioned methods, team members can create tasks and participate in discussions to complete the document. They can also upload files, such as research papers or guidelines, to the workspace to aid in the document’s development. Once the team finalizes the document, you can publish it back to the original source location.

The next two Try It Outs show you how to create a document workspace as well as how to publish the document from that workspace back to its original location.

Try It Out-Create a Document Workspace from a Document

In the following example, you create a new document in the team site. This team site was created in the “Create a New Site Using the Team Site Template” Try It Out. From this new document, called “Sales Proposal” - an important opportunity for a company’s sales team - you will create a document workspace where users can collaborate. On the team site, sales team members can only upload and review documents within the site. However, you can configure the document workspace to allow members to perform more administrative functions and duties. Because their involvement is much higher, they can add content, create views, participate in discussions, and share information required to develop the proposal.

1. From the main page of the team site you created in the “Create a New Site Using the Team Site Template” Try It Out, click the Shared Documents link from the Quick Launch bar.

2. Click the New button from the toolbar. Word opens a blank document.

3. Save the blank document in the document library as Sales Proposal.doc, as shown in Figure 8-19.

   
   Figure 8-19

4. Close the document.

5. Hover your mouse over the Sales Proposal document and click the menu that appears. Select Send to Create Document Workspace, as shown in Figure 8-20.

   
   Figure 8-20

6. You are redirected to a screen that displays the name and location of your document workspace. Click the OK button to complete the creation of your workspace.

How It Works

Although you can name your document whatever you want, for this example, the new “Sales Proposal” document represents a sales opportunity where work centers around the document’s development. A document workspace is ideal for this development because team members can collaborate independently of the day-to-day operations on the team site. You created a copy of the document in the document workspace, so edits to this copy of the document aren’t visible or available from the original location. However, the previous version of the document is still located in the source document library until you publish the altered workspace copy back to the document library.

Try It Out-Publish a Document Back to the Source Location from a Document Workspace

For this Try It Out, you can assume that developing the proposal from the “Create a Document Workspace from a Document” Try It Out is complete and users have made changes to the sales proposal in the document workspace. You can now publish the document back to the team site for others to view by following these steps:

1. From the Shared Documents library of the document workspace created in the “Create a Document Workspace from a Document” Try It Out, hover your mouse over the Sales Proposal document and select Edit in Microsoft Office Word from the drop-down menu, as shown in Figure 8-21.

   
   Figure 8-21

2. Enter the following text into the document:

   Important 

   This is a sales proposal for a very important project.

3. Save your changes and close the document.

4. Hover your mouse over the Sales Proposal document and click the menu that appears and select Send to Publish to Source Location as shown in Figure 8-22. You are redirected to a page where you are advised that you are about to overwrite the file stored in the Shared Documents library of your team site with the version from your document workspace.

   
   Figure 8-22

5. Click the OK button to complete the operation.

6. You receive a message confirming that the operation was successful, as shown in Figure 8-23. Click the OK button.

   
   Figure 8-23

7. You are returned to the home page of the document workspace.

8. Click the link in the very top left of your screen to return to the home page of your team site. This top left navigation as shown in Figure 8-24 is known as the breadcrumb trail.

   
   Figure 8-24

9. Click Sales Proposal.doc from the Shared Documents library of your team site to view the changes made from the document workspace.

How It Works

From the Shared Documents library of the document workspace, a special action appears on the docu-ment’s menu as was shown in Figure 8-23 so users can publish a copy of the document back to the team site so that it can be viewed there. This does not affect either the document or the workspace in which it resides.

The document workspace remains accessible to its members for historical reference even after the document is complete. In addition, members can use the workspace for later edits to the document. There is no immediate need to delete the workspace, and it will remain in the same location and be available to the site members unless changes are made to its configuration.

Blog

A blog, or weblog, is a user-generated site where an author (or authors) post(s) a journal or set of articles. The site becomes a running commentary on the blog’s subject matter because users are encouraged to respond and share information on whatever’s posted. A post is the original journal entry or article that the author(s) places on the blog. Comments are responses from other users who read the entry or article. Because users can respond to the original post or any subsequent comments and because authors can respond to other user’s comments, blogs are very collaborative in nature. They are extremely easy to use and therefore a popular choice for users who want to share information and experiences with others.

You may choose to use a blog over the other collaborative sites you have reviewed if you want to post news or journal-type entries and receive comments back from others. In a corporate environment, an author might place an article, technical paper, or proposal on the blog so that peers can comment on it. This helps the author refine the document before presenting it to an important audience, client, or manager. In addition, all content posted to the blog is available via an RSS feed. In Chapter 2, you looked at how every list or library in SharePoint offers an RSS feed. While RSS is available throughout SharePoint 2007, it has specific relevance in the world of blogs where the technology has become widely adopted.

The blog site template has many special built-in features and components that are unavailable in other SharePoint site templates, but that allow users to easily manage weblogs without any special technical knowledge or skills. Some key elements of the blog template are as follows:

Open table as spreadsheet

Element	Description
Posts	The primary content element of a weblog. This is the either an initial set of articles, or something users write as part of their involvement with the blog. The columns for this list include title, body, and category. Additional columns define the post, including the number of comments, published date, Created By, and Modified By values.
Comments	Support conversations around a topic or article. Users visit a blog and complete a form that associates their comment with a specific post. By default, comments posted on an article appear immediately. However, you can enable content approval so that the blog’s author can review items before posting them to the site.
Categories	Blogs can have numerous posts and comments. Therefore, authors can assign posts a category. Readers can select a category from a list on the blog’s navigation and view all posts assigned to that category. By default, a blog has three categories upon creation. Users should customize this list to represent the content they intend to publish.
Other Blogs	Also called blogroll. This is a list of links to other blogs that an author places on his or her blog so readers can access other sites. These blogs are either recommended by the author or contain similar content. Blogs owe some of their success to blogrolls that interlink weblog authors to create a larger community focused on an issue. SharePoint has an easy mechanism for collecting a list of links to other blogs by using a standard links list.
Links	Commonly, blog authors include links to other websites related to the subject matter of the blog. By default, the blog site in SharePoint has three items already included within the links list to help users more easily navigate to the photos library and post archive sections of the site.
Photos	Blog authors can share photos with their readers. They may embed specific images within the blog posts themselves or may just have a photo library where users can browse a group of images. The Blog template in SharePoint contains a Photo Library to allow for the easy publishing and sharing of photos.

In the next four Try It Outs, you get a chance to see a blog site in action. You create the blog site, and then you customize it to fit the topics you intend to discuss on the site. You also learn both how to create a new blog post as well as leave comments on the post.

Try It Out-Create a Blog Site

In this example, you create a site based on the blog site template. This site will contain elements that are common to most weblogs including posts, categories, comments, and links. The site will inherit the permissions of the team site you created in the Try It Out “Create a New Site Using the Team Site Template” earlier in the chapter.

1. From the main page of your team site, select Site Actions Create Site, as shown in Figure 8-25. If you do not see this option, you can select Create and then select Sites and Workspaces from the Web Pages category.

   
   Figure 8-25

2. Enter the following information:

   Open table as spreadsheet

   Title	Team Weblog
   Description	This weblog will be a location for team members to share information about things they have learned.
   URL	Weblog
   Site Template	Blog
   User Permissions	Use same permissions as parent site.

3. For the navigation options, select Yes to use the same top link bar as the parent site, as shown in Figure 8-26.

   
   Figure 8-26

4. Click the Create button to create your site.

Try It Out-Customize the Blog Template

Before your team can start posting articles to the blog, it is a good idea to customize it to fit the content that you intend to post there. For example, you need to customize the categories list to feature topics that are relevant to the blog.

In the following example, you replace the sample items in a Category list with actual topics that will be written about on the team weblog. Assume that the intention of the blog is to share knowledge that team members collect as they learn how to use the new technologies of SharePoint and InfoPath. You need to change the Category list to include these topics. By default, only one category may be assigned to a single blog post. However, because the Category column on the posts list is a lookup column to another list, you can change the properties to allow multiple selections.

1. From the home page of your blog site, click the Categories link from the Quick Launch bar as shown in Figure 8-27. You are redirected to the Categories list default view.

   
   Figure 8-27

2. Because the Categories list is the same as all other SharePoint lists, you should edit the items in a manner that allows for easy and fast updates across multiple items. For this, you use the Datasheet view. From the Actions item on the toolbar, select Edit in Datasheet. The screen changes to show the items displayed in a Datasheet view.

3. Select the three existing sample categories and select the Delete button on your keyboard. A mes-sage asks if you want to send the rows to the site Recycle Bin, as shown in Figure 8-28. Click OK.

   
   Figure 8-28

4. Enter the following items into the list for categories by typing into the Datasheet view:

   • SharePoint

   • Office

   • InfoPath

5. Click the Team Weblog link, which is over the word “Categories” on the top left of the window as shown in Figure 8-29 to return to the home page of your weblog site.

   
   Figure 8-29

6. Click the Manage Posts link from the Admin Links Web Part of your site. You are redirected to the default view of your posts list.

7. Select Settings List Settings on the toolbar. You are redirected to the List Settings Admin page.

8. From the Columns section of the Admin page, select the Category hyperlink. The Change Column: Posts window appears.

9. Select the Allow Multiple Values check box as shown in Figure 8-30.

   
   Figure 8-30

10. Click the OK button to save your changes.

How It Works

Besides changing the items in the category list (steps 3 and 4), in steps 8 and 9 you edited the properties of the Category column on the posts list so that users can assign multiple topics to a single post. This is a good example of how you can take the basic template and change it to better suit your needs.

Try It Out-Create a New Blog Entry

Now that you know how to create and customize a blog site, it’s time to add actual content to it so that others can respond to it. The new post you create describes something that you’ve learned so far in this chapter about working with the Blog Site template.

1. From the home page of your blog site, click the Create a Post link from the Admin Links Web Part as shown in Figure 8-31. The Posts: New Item window appears, as shown in Figure 8-32.

   
   Figure 8-31

   
   Figure 8-32

2. Enter Writing a Blog Post in SharePoint 2007 as the title of your post.

3. For the body of your post, enter the following text:

   Important 

   Creating a blog post in SharePoint is as easy as creating any other SharePoint list. By filling out the information for each column and clicking Publish, you can share information with others. Although the blog site template has extra features that aren’t part of other site templates, it has many of the same customization options for lists.

4. For the category, select the SharePoint item from the drop-down menu and click the Add button.

5. Click the Publish button to save your post and make it available for others to view.

How It Works

This process is very similar to creating other list items in SharePoint. You added the SharePoint category because your entry was about SharePoint. If the post had also featured information on InfoPath or Office, you could have included those categories as well. When you clicked Publish in step 5, the post becomes available on the main page. In step 5, you also have the option of saving the post as a draft. This makes the approval status of the post “pending.” By default when a blog site is created, the Posts list has content approval enabled. Because content approval is enabled on the Posts list, only items that are approved will display on the home page. Only users who have permission to approve items, or the original author of a post, can see items saved as drafts. When you created this blog site, you chose to inherit permissions from the parent site. Therefore, any user who has permission to approve content on the team site will also be allowed to approve posts made on the blog site. In Chapter 9, you learn in more detail some of the various groups that exist within a SharePoint and how permissions can be managed to suit your needs.

Try It Out-Leave a Comment on a Blog Post

Once you publish a post, users can review the post and leave comments concerning it. In a team environment, users can create a post outlining what they have learned related to a specific subject and others can post follow-up questions or resources that they have found. In the following example, you see how a user can leave a comment on a blog post.

1. From the main page of the weblog site, select the heading of your previous blog post titled “Writing a Blog Post in SharePoint 2007,” as shown in Figure 8-33. You are redirected to a page, shown in Figure 8-34, which displays the entire article along with any comments that other users have left. Below the comments is a form for you to leave your own comment.

   
   Figure 8-33

   
   Figure 8-34

2. In the Comments form on the page, enter the title Follow Up Question and then enter the below text for your comment’s body:

   Important 

   Will comments appear immediately or do they have to be approved by the site author?

3. Click the Submit Comment button.

How It Works

This example showed another user commenting on a blog post; however, it is not uncommon for the blog author to use the same Comment feature to reply to questions or comments left by others. By default, comments posted to the site are automatically approved. However, because comments are stored in a standard SharePoint list, you can enable content approval to allow authors the opportunity to review comments before they appear for others to see. You can enable content approval on a list or library from within the Version History settings of a list, as shown in Figure 8-35.

Figure 8-35

Wiki

Besides blogs, wikis are a new popular tool that enables users to share and edit content in SharePoint. Whereas a blog is a running commentary on a particular subject, on a wiki site a user can literally change web page content. An extremely popular global online site, Wikipedia (www.wikipedia.com), demonstrates just how powerful the wiki concept can be as an information repository.

Because users edit wikis with SharePoint’s built-in Content Editor, they require no HTML or code experience. In a corporate environment, a wiki site encourages collaboration and brainstorming without the restrictions of a formal content editing or approval process. This makes wikis ideal for mapping out new ideas or for collaborating on an upcoming project, which users can later move to more formalized documents and policies. Because you can quickly create new content that is indexed and easy to navigate, you can set up information in a Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ) or a KnowledgeBase format.

Tip 

A KnowledgeBase is a collection of information related to a topic or group of topics that provides good reference to other users. You may have a KnowledgeBase related to a product line that addresses many of the common support and sales scenarios that may arise. By using a wiki, it is easy for team members to keep the KnowledgeBase up to date as new scenarios or circumstances surface.

In SharePoint 2007, you can create either a wiki site or a wiki document library. A wiki site is ideal for a technical support team’s KnowledgeBase or human resources’ policies and procedures. A wiki document library provides the same collaboration features of a site within a single library. This is helpful in situations where there is not expected to be a large amount of information collected, and team members can benefit from using the wiki directly on an existing collaborative site.

To show you just how powerful a tool wikis are, the next two Try It Outs illustrate how to create a wiki site, and then how to edit a wiki page.

Try It Out-Create a Wiki Site

In Chapter 3, you learned how to create a wiki document library, and in this Try it Out you will look at the steps related to creating a dedicated site for a wiki. A common use for a wiki site is to collect information concerning a specific topic in a central location. In this example, you create a subsite below your team site to store solutions for problems stemming from a new process.

Tip 

For more information on the team site template, see the “Create a New Site Using the Team Site Template” Try It Out earlier in the chapter.

1. From the main page of your team site, select Site Actions Create Site, as shown in Figure 8-36.

   
   Figure 8-36

2. Enter the following information or select the following options:

   Open table as spreadsheet

   Title	Team KnowledgeBase
   Description	This wiki site stores common solutions to problems encountered from the new process.
   URL	Kb
   Site Template	Wiki Site
   User Permissions	Use same permissions as parent site.

3. For the navigation options, select Yes to use the top link bar of the parent site as shown in Figure 8-37.

   
   Figure 8-37

4. Click the Create button to create your site.

How It Works

Your wiki site is created with a page containing instructions and placeholder content. You can edit the page to include content more suitable to your topic. In addition, you can add other pages by clicking the New button on the Pages library.

Try It Out-Edit a Wiki Page

In this example you see how easy it is to update content on a wiki page without knowing code. All edits to wiki pages are versioned. AHistory button also exists to view the different versions of the pages and explicitly what content was edited, removed, or added. Changes are conveniently color-coded with gray representing deleted content and yellow representing added content.

1. From the wiki site’s home page, click the Edit link as shown in Figure 8-38. The wiki content appears as shown in Figure 8-39.

   
   Figure 8-38

   
   Figure 8-39

2. Select the existing page content, and click the Delete button.

3. Enter the following text:

   Important 

   Welcome to the new knowledgebase for our team. Please feel free to add content to this page or create additional pages for new topics by going to the Pages document library.

4. Click the OK button.

When you return to the page, your new content appears. Click the History button to view the differences between the current version and previous versions.

Meeting Templates

As previously mentioned, SharePoint has special workspaces to allow collaboration and communication about meetings. Because most businesses revolve around meetings, there are a variety of templates for various meeting types as well as the information that team members need both to prepare for them and to store items discussed at them.

SharePoint has five meeting workspace templates:

Open table as spreadsheet

Site Template	Content Elements
Basic Meeting Workspace	Objectives Agenda Attendees Document Library
Blank Meeting Workspace	Empty
Decision Meeting Workspace	Objectives Attendees Agenda Document Library Tasks Decisions
Social Meeting Workspace	Attendees Directions Things to Bring Discussion Board Picture Library
Multipage Meeting Workspace	Objective Agenda Attendees

Each meeting workspace lets you create new content elements and multiple pages so that you can adapt your meeting documents to your business requirements.

You have two methods for creating a meeting workspace:

• Follow the same process that you use for creating all other subsites as described earlier when creating a team site, blog site, and wiki site.

• Create a meeting workspace related to a specific event in an Events list, as shown in the follow-ing Try It Out.

Try It Out-Create a Meeting Workspace from an Item in a Calendar List

Because meeting workspaces are often tied to Events or Calendar list items that are listed already on a SharePoint site, it makes sense to use the Calendar list item to create a meeting workspace within the same process, as shown in the following steps. By creating an item based on an event in a calendar list, SharePoint creates an automatic link between the item in the site calendar and the meeting workspace so users can easily navigate between both items.

1. From the home page of your team site created earlier in the “Create a New Site Using the Team Site Template” Try It Out, click the Calendar link from the Quick Launch bar. If you do not see a calendar link on your Quick Launch bar, you may select the list from the View All Site Content page of your site.

2. Select New Item as shown in Figure 8-40. The Calendar: New Item window appears as shown in Figure 8-41.

   
   Figure 8-40

   
   Figure 8-41

3. Enter a title for the meeting. For this example, use Annual Board Meeting.

4. For the Location, enter a room or floor number and room description. For this example, use 7th Floor Board Room.

5. Select the check box to make the item an All-Day activity.

6. Select a date for the event. For this example, use November 16, 2007 as the Start and End Time.

7. Select the check box to Make This a Repeating Event.

8. Specify that the event should repeat on an annual basis on the second Friday of November starting on November 9, 2007, as shown in Figure 8-41.

9. Select the check box to create a meeting workspace.

10. Click the OK button. A meeting workspace creation page appears.

11. Change the URL to abm (Annual Board Meeting) rather than the default value based on the title of the site.

12. Click the OK button. The Template Selection window appears, as shown in Figure 8-42.

    
    Figure 8-42

13. Select the Basic Meeting Workspace template.

14. Click the OK button.

How It Works

In this example, you chose to make your meeting an all-day event. This is suitable for events that are expected to take up the entire day. An example of this might be a holiday or vacation day. In some cases, such as the Annual Board Meeting example in the previous Try It Out, you might select that something is an All-Day Event to remove any references to specific hours and to let others know that they should attend for the entire day. If you do not select All-Day Event, you will be required to specify a time interval for which the event will take place. In the case of a two-hour meeting that started at 8 A.M., you would enter 8 A.M. for the start time and 10 A.M. for the end time.

You could also have not made this item repeat if the meeting was a one-time occurrence. In that case, you skip step 8. In step 11, you change the URL to abm because it is a much shorter form of “Annual Board Meeting” and will make the URL more attractive and simple to users. Figure 8-43 shows an example of the meeting workspace home page.

Enterprise Templates

Larger organizations can have information dispersed or spread across many locations. SharePoint includes templates to address ways in which information such as reports, records, and official documents can be published and shared with others. Collaboration and meeting sites are great tools for teams and groups of individuals to work together toward a common goal. However, many organizations also require sites and templates to address the need to strictly share information in a view-only format for everyone in the organization or larger groups of people.

Figure 8-43

For example, the sales and marketing team of your company may have their own collaborative site using the team site template described in an earlier example. In this site, they will share documents and collaborate on the creation of reports and proposals. However, in some cases they may want to take a single report and publish it to a location where it can be viewed by the entire organization. It may not be practical to expect or allow the entire organization to find that report on their collaborative site because of access restrictions. Therefore, they may use an enterprise template such as the Report Center to publish the file to a site specifically tailored for such information display.

The next few sections provide a description of the some of the different templates that exist under the Enterprise category in SharePoint.

Document Center

The Document Center is a site template that is a part of the Collaboration publishing template described in the next section of this chapter. You can use this template to create a document center site within any site collection so that you can organize documents within the portal. It has an announcement list, task list and document library. Web Parts are available to display content from these lists and other lists within the site. Figure 8-44 shows an example of the Document Center.

Figure 8-44

Because this site can potentially contain numerous documents over the course of time, having an easy method for users to identify content relevant to them is very important. Therefore, the Web Part on the main page of the site displays any documents that a user last modified or checked out. Because this site uses the Relevant Documents Web Part, it may not always be necessary to store all documents in a single document library. You could create multiple document libraries, and content is displayed to users from the single Web Part. You would do this if you have multiple unique topics on which different users or groups would be publishing information. By separating the content in multiple libraries, you could customize each library to suit the specific storage requirements of each type of information as well as change permissions to suit unique management needs or rights.

Tip 

In Chapter 9, you learn how you can change permissions related to a single library or list to be unique from the site in which they are contained.

Report Center

The Report Center is a part of the Collaboration publishing template. You use it within any other site collection as long as you enable the Publishing feature for that site collection. Instructions for enabling features on a site collection are given later in this chapter. Using the sample data and instructions that are part of the Report Center site template shown in Figure 8-45, a site manager can create a reporting portal to display worksheets and other business applications.

Tip 

Chapter 11 discusses report centers, Excel Services, performance indicator information, and other business reporting features.

Figure 8-45

Records Center

SharePoint 2007 enables users to assign rules and policies to certain types of content in order to consistently manage and control the access, expiry, and deletion of important corporate records. This is an area of major concern for many large organizations that store customers’ personal information or manage information that has specific access and retention rights. Healthcare, insurance, and government agencies are just a few examples of the types of organizations that have requirements for effective record management. Effective handling of such information is not only critical for historical reference or corporate protection, but may also be required by law. Using these policies, you can track content within special repositories to maintain the integrity of your documents in a formalized and controlled manner. The Records Center has several lists and libraries that help control and store records and managed content. Figure 8-46 shows an example of a Records Center site upon initial creation.

Figure 8-46

Tip 

Chapter 6 discusses the various information management policies you can create.

News

Common to most organizations is the need to share news and announcements about important internal and industry-related events. The News template is designed to easily create news content articles that can be published for others to share. News stories can be created by content owners by selecting Create Page from the Site Actions menu, and will be automatically listed in a customized Content Query Web Part at the top of the news page. In addition, any previous news articles can be viewed by clicking the Browse News Archive link at the right of the page, as shown in Figure 8-47.

Figure 8-47

In addition, this template comes configured with an RSS Viewer Web Part that was introduced in Chapter 7 and can provide a great way to display news articles from other non-SharePoint sources such as major news sites or industry publications.

Site Directory

Contained within the Collaboration publishing site template is the Site Directory template that organizes sites created within a site collection and is therefore very important for many corporate intranet scenarios. You can add more site directories to a corporate intranet in cases where you need to track many sites, each with unique properties.

The Site Directory template has a special list called sites that stores metadata and information about sites within a site collection. This becomes critical when a corporation needs to maintain a good level of organization as it creates more and more sites. By default, SharePoint provides a few columns to track information such as:

• Region:   The region a site represents.

• Division:   The division for which the site was created.

• Owner:   Which member of the organization is considered the owner of the site.

You can create additional columns to further define the sites. In fact, whenever you create a new corporate intranet site, you should go to the Site directory and customize the columns of the Sites list so that newly created sites are properly categorized and organized.

By default in SharePoint 2007, you can only create subsites in the site collection. This differs from SharePoint Portal Server 2003 where you can create new site collections instead. Creating a new site collection is a good idea for large deployment where the top-level sites have different sets of templates and components and won’t share content with other sites. You can create new collections in SharePoint 2007, but you need to configure things differently from both the central administration site and the Corporate Intranet site collection.

Tip 

Site columns and content types (which were described in Chapters 4 and 6 respectively) cannot be shared across site collections. As well, certain Web Parts that we looked at in Chapter 7 such as the Content Query Web Part only display content from a single site collection. Therefore, if you anticipate a need to standardize content types, metadata, and display information using the Content Query Web Part, a single site collection may be more appropriate. If you anticipate a larger scale deployment where sites would require their own unique templates, content types, and metadata without much need for displaying content from other sites, then multiple site collections may be more appropriate.

The next two Try It Outs show you how to customize the site list in the Site Directory as well as how to configure the Site Directory to create site collections rather than standard subsites. This is a good idea for large deployments where most top-level sites are expected to use a completely unique set of templates and components and have few requirements for cross-site content sharing.

Try It Out-Customize the Sites List of the Site Directory

In this example, you edit the Sites list so that it contains a special column called Site Type, which will distinguish whether a site is for a team, division, client, or project. You also modify the Division category to include a choice for Marketing.

1. From the home page of your corporate intranet site, click the Sites link from the top link bar.

2. Click the View All Site Content link on the Quick Launch bar.

3. Click the Sites link from the Lists section, as shown in Figure 8-48. You are redirected to a list displaying links to sites that have been created in your site collection and added to the Site Directory.

   
   Figure 8-48

4. Select Settings List Settings on the toolbar. You are redirected to the List Administration page.

5. From the Columns section, click the Division column link. You are redirected to the Settings page for the Division column.

6. From the Additional Column Settings section, update the choice value list to include Marketing, as shown in Figure 8-49.

   
   Figure 8-49

7. Click the OK button. You return to the List Administration page.

8. Click the Create Column link from the Columns section.

9. In the Column Name field, enter a name for your column. For this example, enter Site Type.

10. Select Choice, as shown in Figure 8-50, for the type of column.

    
    Figure 8-50

11. For Require That This Column Contains Information field, select Yes.

12. In the Choice field, enter the values that you want users to be able to select concerning an item. For this example, enter Team Site, Division Site, Client Site, and Project Site.

13. Select Radio Buttons for the display choice.

14. Remove the default value so that it is blank.

15. Click the OK button.

How It Works

Your customization of the Sites list for this example will better capture information on sites in the site collection. Now, whenever users create a new site, they will have the option to select Marketing as a choice for the division and will be required to specify whether the site is intended for tracking information related to a team, division, project, or client.

Try It Out-Configuring the Site Directory to Create Site Collections

In the following example, you create site collections from the Site Directory instead of subsites. To do this, you first enable self-service site creation within the Central Administration site. You then return to the primary site collection that contains the Site Directory and modify the Site Directory settings so that site collections are created from that location. In the previous Try It Out, you created a site collection by visiting the Central Administration site. Now, you create the same site collection from the Site Directory.

You would enable the creation of site collections from the Site Directory if you were managing a SharePoint environment where different departments or divisions were very unique and therefore did not share the same templates, content types, security settings, or site columns. For example, imagine you were managing a SharePoint implementation for a large multinational company that created several unique product lines that operated with completely separate management teams, departments, and staff. Each group would not be required to share information with one another or display content from one another’s sites. In this situation, it may be more beneficial to allow for each main product line to have its own site collection. Another example might be where a large government organization has implemented SharePoint, and each key organizational unit would have a requirement to operate independently from the other. For example, there would be no requirement to display federal healthcare forms and policies on the same site as the federal department related to military and defense.

1. Log into the Central Administration site of your SharePoint environment.

   Tip 

   The Central Administration site is a unique site collection and has tighter access requirements than your standard portal site. If you do not have access, contact your server administrator to assist with this step. Also, the Central Administration site is usually hosted on a different port than your corporate por-tal, so it is a good idea to add the link to your My Links list under an Admin group.

2. Select the Application Management tab.

3. Click the Self-Service Site Management link from the Application Security section, as shown in Figure 8-51. You are redirected to the Self-Service Site Management page, as shown in Figure 8-52.

   
   Figure 8-51

   
   Figure 8-52

4. Select your web application from the drop-down list. Generally most portals are hosted under port 80. If you are unsure which application is correct, check with your system administrator.

5. Under Enable Self-Service Site Creation, select On.

6. Click the OK button.

7. Return to your corporate intranet site and select Site Actions Modify All Site Settings.

8. Select Site Directory Settings from the Site Collection Administration section.

9. Select the check box for Create New Site Collections from Site Directory, as shown in Figure 8-53.

   
   Figure 8-53

10. Click the OK button.

Search Center

You can create a Search Center using one of two templates. In SharePoint 2007, one template has been revamped to include common search tabs such as People or All Sites if you want them; an example of this shown in Figure 8-54. The advantage of tabs is that you can predefine certain search types that a user may want to conduct and have a page dedicated specifically to that topic. For example, by selecting the People tab, any queries you enter will only search the user profiles of people within your organization.

Tip 

Because the searching for information is so important, this topic is covered in great detail in Chapter 14.

Figure 8-54

Publishing Templates

When creating a new site collection, users have the ability to select either Collaboration Portal or Publishing Portal from the Publishing tab. These sites are not available as subsites because of their unique content and usage scenarios. Instead, they can only be selected when creating a new site collection.

Collaboration Portal

As discussed earlier in this chapter, the Collaboration publishing template is the standard starting point for most intranet portal sites in 2007. This site template features a top-level site and five subsites based on sites created from the previously reviewed Enterprise template category including:

• Document Center

• News

• Reports

• Search

• Sites

The Collaboration site template comes with the publishing feature enabled so that all changes made to the content of each portal page must be checked in, published, and approved. Because this template is generally used to reflect the communication needs of an organization, the content displayed is generally more tightly managed than what is shared at the team and divisional level.

Publishing Portal

The Publishing Portal site gives you a starting point for the type of site you would typically see when browsing the Internet. This is sometimes referred to as an Internet facing website. It contains lists and libraries to store web content and workflows, including a workflow for approving created or modified content. Figure 8-55 shows an example of a publishing portal.

Figure 8-55

Tip 

Chapter 13 details the features and functionality related to managing Internet facing websites and web content management as well as how it works as part of the Publishing Portal site template.

Creating Custom Templates

As mentioned previously, the templates discussed in this chapter so far may only give you some of the elements you need for an effective collaboration or communication site. To create a site for your situation, you can use an existing template and then create the additional elements you need. Once you have a site that works for you, you can save your site as a template for future use. Corporations commonly do this to create uniform sites and to save time and effort when creating new sites.

Try It Out-Save a Site as Template

In this example, you create a team site and add another library to store team photos - a requirement expressed by management. Rather than having each person with a team site manually create a photo library, you add the library to a site and then save that site as a template for the other teams to use.

1. Return to your team site that was created earlier in this chapter in the “Create a New Site Using the Team Site Template” Try It Out.

2. Select Site Actions Create. You are redirected to the List and Library template selection page.

3. Select Picture Library from the Libraries section.

4. Enter Shared Photos for the library name.

5. Select Yes for the Create a Version Every Time You Edit a File in This Picture library item.

6. Click the Create button. You are redirected to your newly created Picture Library.

7. Select Site Actions Site Settings. You are redirected to the Site Administration page.

8. Click the Save Site as Template link from the Look and Feel section, as shown in Figure 8-56. You are redirected to a page where you must define the details of your site template, shown in Figure 8-57.

   
   Figure 8-56

   
   Figure 8-57

8. Enter a file name for the template. For this example, enter standardteam.

9. Enter a template name for the template. For this example, enter Standard Team Site.

10. Enter a description of the template. For this example, enter the following:

    Important 

    This site template should be used for creating all company team sites as it contains all the common elements required, including a picture library.

11. Click the OK button. You are redirected to a page stating that your site template has been saved successfully.

How It Works

Now users can use that template when creating their sites by selecting it from the Custom tab as shown in Figure 8-58.

Figure 8-58