Applies To: SharePoint Designer 2010 With Microsoft SharePoint Designer 2010, you can design and build robust SharePoint applications that include a rich set of data sources, customer-facing views and forms, highly customized workflows, and more. Once you’ve built your business solution site, you can start using it right away in your SharePoint environment. Or, you can turn your solution into a template and deploy it in another environment, make it available to users so they can create new sites from it, or hand it off for further development in Visual Studio. Turning your customized site or business solution into a template is an extremely useful and very powerful capability in SharePoint 2010. Once you start to package your solution as a template, you begin to realize SharePoint’s potential as a platform for business applications. This article describes SharePoint templates, what they’re used for, how to turn your site into a template, and how to activate that template on the server. In this article What is a SharePoint site template? Top 10 SharePoint Templates for Small Businesses. Generated and sales conversions. The template even includes. The Competitive Analysis Site template. You can request for Departmental SharePoint Templates like Sales, HR, IT. Where can I find free templates for SharePoint? SharePoint 2010. SharePoint site templates are pre-built definitions designed around a particular business need. You can use these templates as they are to create your own SharePoint site and then customize the site as much as you like. You’re probably familiar with the default site templates, like Team Site, Blog site, and Group Work Site as shown here. In addition to the default templates, you can create your own site template based on a site you’ve created and customized in SharePoint. This is a powerful feature in SharePoint that allows you to create a custom solution and then share that solution with your peers, the broader organization, or outside organizations. You can also package the site and open it in another environment or application like Microsoft Visual Studio and further customize it there. When you save your site as a template, you create a Web Solution Package, or WSP. A WSP is a CAB file with the solution manifest. The solution you create gets stored in the Solution Gallery for the SharePoint site collection. From there, you can download a copy of the solution or activate it on the server. Note: The WSP you create is a partial trust user solution that has the same declarative format as a full trust SharePoint solution. However, it does not support the full extent of feature element types that are supported by full trust solutions. What gets saved in a template When you save your SharePoint site as a template, you’re saving the overall framework of the site – its lists and libraries, views and forms, and workflows. In addition to these components, you can include the contents of the site in the template, for example, the documents stored in the document libraries. This could be useful to provide sample content for users to get started with. Keep in mind that this could also increase the size of your template beyond the default 50 MB site template limit. Most of the objects in a site are included and supported by the template. There are a number of objects and features not supported however. The following table provides a quick summary of what’s in and what’s out of a typical site template, or solution. Included in user solution WSP Not included in user solution WSP • Lists • Libraries • External Lists • Data source connections • List views and data views • Custom forms • Workflows • Content Types • Custom Actions • Navigation • Site pages • Master pages • Modules • WebTemplates • Customized permissions • Running workflow instances • List item version history • Workflow tasks associated with running workflows • People/group field values • Taxonomy field values • Publishing pages and publishing sites • My Sites What can you do with SharePoint templates? Saving a site as a template is a powerful feature because it offers so many different uses of custom sites in SharePoint. Here are the immediate benefits you get from saving a site as a template in SharePoint. • Customized SharePoint sites can be deployed as solutions immediately Save and activate the template in the solutions gallery and let other employees create new sites from this template. You don’t need Visual Studio to create your solution, and you have to access the server directly and run server administrator commands. Just save the site as a template, activate it, and off you go. • Customized SharePoint sites are portable – In addition to deploying a custom solution in your environment, you can download the.wsp file, take it on the road, and deploy it in another SharePoint environment. All of your site customization is conveniently stored in one file. • Customized SharePoint sites are extensible – As a Web Solution Package, you can open your customized site in Visual Studio, perform additional development customization to the template and then deploy it to SharePoint. SharePoint site development, as a result, can go through a site development lifecycle that includes SharePoint Designer 2010, Microsoft Visual Studio, and the browser. As you begin creating custom sites in SharePoint, you’ll discover even more benefits to turning your site into a solution that can be made portable across the organization. Saving a site as a template You can save a site as a template at any time using the template option (Save site as template) on the Site Settings page in SharePoint. SharePoint Designer 2010 makes it easy by providing a Save as Template option in the ribbon, which takes you to this page in SharePoint. Once you save the template, a solution file is created and stored in the Solution Gallery where you can download or activate the solution. To save your site as a template using SharePoint Designer 2010, perform the following steps: • Open your site in SharePoint Designer 2010. • On the Site tab, in the Manage group, click Save as Template. • This takes you to the Save as Template page in SharePoint. • Specify a name to use for the template file in the File name field. • Specify a name and description for the template in the Template name and Template description fields. • To include the content of the site in the site template, check the Include Content box. Note: Including the content of the site can increase the size of the template significantly. Keep in mind that the default size limit for a site template is 50 MB but may be less in your organization. • Click OK to save the template. • If all of the components on the site are valid, the template is built, and you see a message that says Operation Completed Successfully. • To download or activate the solution from the solution gallery, click the user solution gallery link and follow the steps in the procedure below. • Or, to return to your site, click OK. Activating the site template in the solution gallery Once you’ve saved your site as a template, a solution file (.wsp) is created and stored in the Solution Gallery for the site collection. From here, you can download or activate the solution. To activate your site template, perform the following steps: • Browse to the top level site of your site collection in SharePoint. • Click Site Actions and choose Site Settings. • Under Galleries, click Solutions. • To activate your solution, click the pull-down menu beside your solution, and choose Activate. • On the activate solution confirmation screen, click Activate. Your solution now has an activated status in the Solution Gallery. • To download the solution, just click its name in the Solution Gallery. • In the File Download dialog box, click Save, and browse to the location where you want to save the solution. Next steps With your solution uploaded and activated in the Solution Gallery, users will see it as an available template on the Create site page in SharePoint. You can select it and create a new site from it, which will inherit the components of the site, its structure, workflows, and more. Or, you can download your solution from the Solution Gallery and deploy it in another SharePoint environment or open it up in Microsoft Visual Studio, which also supports WSPs. The site template option in SharePoint Designer 2010 makes all of this possible. Learn more about WSPs in the See Also section. A tweet came up tonight that I thought I would get my lazy butt doing something about: I pointed to ’s post and while Todd does go over the templates and gives a brief rundown of them, there’s not a lot of meat to what you get with each template. So for Tareq (and anyone else who’s out there) here’s a more detailed breakdown of the site templates in SharePoint 2010. This is part 1 of a four-part post as I got past the 2 hour mark and decided I would call it quits with the initial templates. I’ll follow it up with additional posts to complete all of the template descriptions and notes (and link everything together to make it a happy-happy-joy-joy world we live in). Note, this is a list of the templates you get with SharePoint Server 2010. For SharePoint Foundation 2010, you’ll only find a subset of what you see here (but there’s nothing Foundation has that Server doesn’t). Also there are some templates that will only appear after activating certain site or site collection features. I’ll cover some of those in a bonus post later. Clear as mud? Creating Sites When you create a new site you’ll see the new create dialog like the one below (there’s a regular HTML version but you really want to install Silverlight on your client to get the rich UI experience). Each category along the site lets you filter down the template selections and selecting any template gives a brief description to give you an idea of what the template is about. 24 Comments • Cool post Bil - looking forward to the others. I haven't looked at all the templates in Sharepoint 2010 yet so I'll be interested to see your impressions. Team site was always our workhorse in 2007 and making it a Wiki is a big improvement. Kevin Ryall - • Thanks for this! Do you know if you can use the old 07 Fab 40 Templates to SharePoint 2010? I kinda dig a couple of them. DaGenester - • Thanks for this and your insight. Saved me hours of exploration time.:) TJO - • Thanks a lot! This is very helpful information for a quick impression and not too detailed - looking forward to the next parts. US - • Thanks a lot!This is very helpful.we Need Part 2 is also. Kishorekarra - • Great Post, when will you get to rest of the parts? Ben - • Brilliant.but can we have part 2, please? Tracey - • Thank you, Bil, for the post! Reading it I've got a feeling that Microsoft intentionally doesn't want to create 'full-featured' end-User components (Enterprize blog, Wiki, Room reservation system etc.) in order to open the market for the partners (developers who use SharePoint as a development platform). So the real value of all this Templates is to sell an ideas of those components to the Customer. As soon as Customer starts using any of this 'unfinished' component in a business environment, he is ready for the real ('Pro') solution sold separately:-) yvolk - • Nice blog - but does anyone have a list of the templates you get with Sharepoint foundation 2010 (not server)?? Elaine - • Thanks. This gave me the details I was looking for. Jacob_poly - • This is great. When will Part II - IV be available? Ann - • This is great. When will Part II - IV be available? Dkhunt27 - • Bil, Thanks for publishing this information. Do you have any comments on the Project Management templates for 2010? Since Microsoft quit supporting the Fabulous Forty (and I'm told they won't work on 2010), some great functionality seems to have been relegated to the supplier community. - • Are parts two through four going to be written/published? Magusnet - • Good publishing. Quick Q: I created a blog subsite which has basic Category, Archives in the Quick Launch bar. I went to Site Settings>Navigation and added my own links which dont reflect in the Quick Launch bar. How do I make them visible? Raj - • It would be great to get more info on templates - • Still waiting for Parts 2 - 4. This maybe since part 1 was first published in July 2010, part 2 can be published in July 2011?;) Mike - • Well I thought this would be the perfect page to answer my question. Only to find that after almost a year parts 2-4 are not available. Tyler - • When will Part 2 to 4 be available. Its just what I needed. Only if part 2 -4 were also there. Please load them up soon Neha - • Hello, Is the contacts web database site available in sharepoint foundation 2010? Thank you, Alkis Alkis Spyrou - • Hmm. It seems you've forgotten about parts II-IV? Tyler - • Great post. I found it clear and simple and I liked so much your sense of humor. Luis Javier - • Will you provide also parts II - IV? Part I explanation of site templates is perfect. Peter - • Thanks a lot for sharing this awesome blog post. This article is very useful you can search information about Theme for sharepoint 2010.
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