Mary Jo Foley has details about a new set of templates that just arrived for SharePoint Services, the collaboration technology built into Windows Server 2003:
On Tuesday, Microsoft quietly rolled out 30 free, downloadable applications that build on top of the company’s SharePoint Services collaboration/workflow technology that is built into Windows Server.
Among the plethora new applications are horizontal and vertical applets both. Schedule-management, consumer-financing, employee-training, event-management, travel-request, classroom-management, campaign-management and other similar types of offerings are available immediately.
I noticed the full collection had appeared on the Microsoft Downloads server yesterday. This one caught my eye, for instance:
The Competitive Intelligence (CI) Dashboard application for Microsoft Windows SharePoint Services is designed to improve organization of CI-related materials, and communication about competitive issues among sales, public relations, marketing, product or service management, and executive personnel.
I’ve used SharePoint for a couple of years, and it’s been an indispensable tool for collaboriting with my co-authors, editors, and production folks in the process of putting together books for Microsoft Press. You don’t have to be a Fortune 500 company either; even a group of two or three people can benefit from the features in SharePoint. It’s a huge improvement over the alternative most people use, which is to share files and lists via e-mail. (And Windows Small Business Server 2003, which is very affordable, includes all the SharePoint features you need.)
With templates like these, the process of creating a SharePoint site literally takes a few clicks. It’s worth checking out.
Ed Bott 