SharePoint Templates for 2010

It has been seven days since my last SharePoint blog and as football has proved this week seven days is a very long time. If we go back to twenty to five on Saturday afternoon when West Ham had just taken the lead at Everton putting the mighty Aston Villa in the relegation zone and Andy Gray was probably having a nice cup of tea without a care in the world. Now just five days on Villa are six points clear of the drop, Andy Gray is a bad boy looking for a new job and West Ham are now bottom of the league (again!). So things can change very quickly in only a few days and this is also true with SharePoint projects. 

If you are a SharePoint Administrator you will know that SharePoint is fairly easy to install and configure. For only a single server installation (suitable for up to 100 users) it is very feasible to have SharePoint up and running within half a day. But you are then left with a very empty shell that is not easy to really sell to the various departments in your organisation. A number of companies install SharePoint (either the free SharePoint Foundation or a trial version of SharePoint) but then remains dormant in the depths of the IT department. Problem is it just doesn’t really do anything. Yes you can add documents but with no metadata and no views created it is very difficult to demonstrate to the various departments that might find it useful. You have probably read about how SharePoint can be used by HR Departments, Marketing Departments and Safety Departments but how can you show the Department Managers what it can do for you when all you have is a SharePoint skeleton?

What would be great is to give the organisation a system that is already working that already has a Risk Assessment system, a Car Park Permit Management system, an IT Helpdesk system, an Expense system and many other useful systems. The chance for each department to get quickly started and see the real potential SharePoint has for them.

Many companies worldwide are now taking advantage of the selection of 11 SharePoint Department templates offered by us at Office Talk to put real meat on their initial SharePoint skeleton.

With this bundle of useable SharePoint Templates all the major departments can have a launching pad for their own SharePoint sites. We are not saying that that the various lists and libraries will not need to be customised to meet your own specific needs but they will give you a very good starting point in a very short time.

To find out more about, or order, the SharePoint Templates just visit http://www.office-talk.com/index.php?id=151. The Templates are available for both SharePoint 2010 and 2007.

So in seven days your SharePoint can be up and running and ready for your users to really get their teeth into it. We still recommend you put together a SharePoint Project Team with key users from each department.

So what next for Andy Gray? Maybe he is just finally getting his comeuppance for deserting the Villa for my brother’s Wolves team back in 1979. Perhaps he could become a commentator for women’s football on some far off satellite TV channel.

As for the Villa hopefully we can now go from strength to strength and I can start dreaming of FA Cup glory again.