New SharePoint Templates - For All Departments

This week England’s World Cup 2018 Bidding Committee selected the sixteen venues they would use if we were to host the World Cup. Now some of them have caused a few people to look surprised. The choices of Milton Keynes, Plymouth and Bristol are hardly hotbeds of football, in fact Milton Keynes had to buy a club just to get people interested. Obviously Villa Park, the home of the great Aston Villa, was chosen so my seat might have a cosmopolitan bottom sitting on it in the summer of 2018 (perhaps one of those nice Brazilian ladies). So why have so many different cities been selected? The idea is so all areas of England can enjoy the World Cup and feel involved. This I think is also important when planning SharePoint. I feel it is important to make it not just a Marketing Project or an IT System, but instead from as early as possible get all the departments fully involved. Spread SharePoint around the organisation.

SharePoint, be it the free Windows SharePoint Services or the more detailed MOSS, has features that can benefit all departments. Some features help with common challenges we all face like managing documents, storing useful contact information and sharing calendar items, but other parts of SharePoint can be customised uniquely to fit individual departments. In the same way each city in our World Cup Bid offers different selling points for the bid. For example Plymouth can have great Fans Festivals on the beach, Wembley brings the historic buildings of London like Buckingham Palace and Villa Park brings the ethnic diversity of Aston.

Now please allow me to promote my own specially designed SharePoint Department Templates which are available individually or as a set of nine from Office Talk or all good online stores. Ideal as stocking fillers for your IT Managers. They are far too cheap with the set of nine only costing about the same price as my Villa season ticket. So what are these Department Templates?

Well, I have tried to think about the type of Departments that all businesses, or organisations, tend to have. The type that if the question on Family Fortunes was, ‘Which Departments would you find in a company’ would be popular answers with the one hundred people surveyed. The nine I chose were in no particular order Safety, IT , Purchasing, Media Library (storage of digital media, ok not a good answer on Family Fortunes), Finance, Projects, Human Resources and Training. Sorry if I have missed your department out.

For each of these departments I canvassed a few people (sounds like Family Fortunes again, bring back Les Dennis) to see the kind of routine task I could include in their SharePoint Template. Did I say that these easy to install templates can be used on either WSS or MOSS? So I have included sections like a Visitor’s Book for Reception, an Incident Report system for Health & Safety, a Hardware Inventory for IT and lots more useful ones.

You can buy these department templates individually or get all nine templates by visiting http://sites.fastspring.com/officetalk/product/actionsharepoint_pack

Hope you will check out these templates and also let me know if there is a department that should have been my number ten. I am going to now think of what might happen before 2018. With the rate the Villa are improving (have already won at Anfield and Old Trafford this season) perhaps we will be winning our third consecutive Champions League then and it will be arise Sir Martin.