I’ve seen it happen a few times. A company loves what they hear about SharePoint. They rave about how it’s going to save their company so much time and money. They love how its going to help streamline some of their business processes. They’re excited that they’re going to be able to track every little thing that comes their way. They pay tons of money to purchase MOSS. They install it on their brand new server farm.
Then….
“Um, where do I start.”
If this is you, and you don’t know where to start, then maybe I can at least point you in the right direction. Sometimes, just looking at an example can be a world of help. Microsoft has what is commonly called the Fantastic 40. A collection of templates (40 of them folks) that are designed to meet specific business requirements.
One example of these templates is the Help Desk template. Once installed, create a new site using the new Help Desk template and you’ll see that the template automatically comes with a Service Request list and a Support FAQs list. A Knowledge Base document library and several application pages with webparts designed to track your service requests.
Fantastic. Now you don’t have to figure out how to set up that help desk site. The templates are also customizable; so don’t worry about being stuck with what you get.
How do I get started? Well, your administrator will have to install the desired templates from the Application Templates for Windows SharePoint Services 3.0 site. When you go to the download area, a set of instructions are listed on the page. Make sure to read those instructions. There will be a link to a solution called ApplicationTemplateCore.wsp. This must be installed before the individual templates are installed. The administrator will have to run the addSolution command, deploy the solution and then run the stsadm -o copyappbincontent command.
After all of this is done, you can enjoy your new template(s) and tweak what you need.
SharePoint Lessons 