"Under the Hood" white papers for Fantastic 40 Application Templates and Splendid 7 My Site Templates now available!
Ever since the releases of the ”Fantastic 40” Application Templates for WSS 3.0 and “Spendid 7” Role-Based My Site Templates for MOSS 2007 during the past several months, many people have asked, “How did they build this or that?” or “Why would they build it this or that way?” So, I’m very happy to announce that the “Under the Hood” white papers for both sets of templates are now available for you to download via the hyperlinked titles below!
The purpose of this paper is to describe how Microsoft developed the application templates, identifying best practices for how to work with core capabilities within both Windows SharePoint Services and SharePoint Designer, with the goal of empowering customers and partners to create their own applications. The paper is not a substitute for the Windows SharePoint Services 3.0 SDK, nor is it primarily a developer resource. Developers should use the SDK for understanding generally how to extend Windows SharePoint Services 3.0.
This paper is meant to be a resource for a new breed of site designers. Because Windows SharePoint Services and SharePoint Designer make it possible to build so much application functionality through the UI, advanced development skills are not required to build rich applications. To be sure, this paper does describe some custom code implementations for particularly tricky design patterns, but the overall methodology should be accessible to non-developers and is presented with that audience in mind. Developers may want to quickly read through the early sections on tools and methodology and pay more attention to the description of the design patterns and the specific examples of how to implement those design patterns
When you finish this paper, you should have a good understanding of how to design and architect an application, how to begin by building a site directly in Windows SharePoint Services, including building linked lists, custom columns, libraries, workflows, and so on, how to then open the site in SharePoint Designer to make further customizations, create custom forms, add custom code to change certain behaviors, create custom workflows, and so on, and, finally, how to create the application template itself and deploy it for usage.
This paper discusses the strategy for building the role-based My Site templates and takes an in-depth look at the common features and Web Parts that make up each of the templates. The paper also provides guidelines for branding, extending, and deploying the My Site Templates and covers a comprehensive set of scenarios that include collaboration, business process management, reporting, document lifecycle management, and project management.
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