Those crazy Germans and their SharePoint templates

By way of Michael Greth, those crazy Germans they hosted the first SharePoint Conference in Munich this week with more than 500 attendees. Michael presented 15 new site templates that were created by Microsoft Partners and customers from Germany. These templates were created during a competition called “SharePointChallenge 2006” and there’s a whole schwack (is that a word?) of them. First, before you all go frothing at the mouth they’re in German. Second, some require extra Web Parts to be installed and setup for them to work (don’t worry, free ones – I think). They are however a great collection of templates for Windows SharePoint Services and again, really show off what can be done with the little tool that could.

What’s great here is that there’s so much diversity. Bug tracking, a Library template for managing books and eBooks, CRM, Project Management (conforming to PMI standards and the Microsoft Solution Framework), Class scheduling, Travel expenses, and more. There’s even a template for tracking a football league with participant administration, play results, and evaluations. Some of these templates also have full documentation and information on their use.

Some are very imaginative in how they are designed and you can utilize these concepts for your own needs (yes, even though they might be in a foreign language for some). So check them out here to download them. They also have a live online demo system here with each template setup so you can give them a test drive yourself. This is great stuff and I can’t stress how important examples like these are needed to show how SharePoint isn’t just a document repository. I really hope someone (not me) would put forth the effort to translate these to English (hint, hint) as I’m sure a lot of people could find them useful.

3 Comments

  • to be honest, i thought those templates were pretty lame. Just basic color & layout customization & then they took a few of the more corporate templates from MS & modded them. for example, it looks like the employee activity templte they modded to organize football / fooseball.

  • thanks Bil for this great summary in English may I use it on my site? Just one addition all the templates have all been used in real implemetations - so now demoing but real world :-)

  • @Goeff: You should've checked the library template. It is neither basic color and layout customization nor does it look like SharePoint at all ;-)



    @Bil: Once I've finished our new company Web site I'm going to release an English version of the library template (via our new company Website ;-)

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