SharePoint Team Room Template: Under the Hood
Recently there were three new Windows SharePoint Services templates added to the mix (much like the 30 or so that MS published awhile back and I have hosted on my development site for you to mess around with). Thanks to Bart Bultinick's blog for the link to these.
As an Agile guy, we have a concept called an Agile Modeling Room (or War Room or Team Room, goes by many names). Basically a dedicated space for the project team to get together and work. No interuptions. No having to move your stuff around. Lots of whiteboards. Lots of creativity. Lots of discussion. You know, collaboration. Oh wait. SharePoint. Collaboration. This is going somewhere.
So if SharePoint is about communication and collaboration, why not build a Team Room using it. Not like anyone hasn't thought about this before but now there's a template you can use and not have to spend a few hours conifiguring lists and all that jazz. Go ahead and download it here. It's an installer which just unzips the .STP file and a README.TXT file to wherever you want. Then you need to upload the .STP file to a top level WSS site template gallery or add it via the STSADM program with the addtemplate command. Finally, create a new site using the template. I've created an online demo of the Team Room site here with the other MS templates I've got online for demo purposes so feel free to look around and even use the Guest account to add and edit content (but please don't mess with it too much).
When you install the Team Room template and create a new site, you're in for a bit of feast. Rather than the usual one or two custom lists that some of the other templates offer, the Team Room template creates 18 lists (mostly used for lookups and views), a document library and discussion board. It's no replacement for an Agile War Room, but it certainly is useful and some work has gone into it by the guys who make all these templates. So here's a breakdown of what you get and ways you can use this new tool.
Main Lists
There are only a few main lists that drive the system but a few nice modifications make these a little more usable than your OOTB list.
Team Announcements
This is just your stock announcements list and lives on the home page. Use it to let the team know of changes to the site. As a rule, I generally tell people to subscribe to something like this and anytime there are major changes, post a message. Saves on having to create alerts to every list.
Discussions
Standard discussion board on the home page. They've added the modified field to the view so you can see when the message was posted (and sort by this). However the big addition here is the form of metadata and views. They've added the following views to this list: By Category, By Event, By Subteam, By Author, Chronological, Created By Me, Condensed View, Assigned To Me, and Keyword Filter. Most of these are filtered/sorted/grouped around the extra metadata they added to the list which includes the following fields:
- Primary Category - Lookup (into Category list)
- Category Keywords - Single line of text
- Associated Event - Lookup (into Event Profile list)
- Associated Subteam - Lookup (into Subteam Profile list)
- Review Deadline - Date and Time
- Reviewer - Lookup (into User Information)
- Review Subteam - Lookup (into Subteam Profile list)
- Review Status - Choice
- Inactive Date - Date and Time
- Keep Active - Yes/No
The Keyword Filter view is interesting. It contains a form web part on top of the list so enter a keyword (like "winter") and see the matching items.
Action Items
Another stock list when it started (the Tasks list) but modified with the following views: By Category, By Event, By Subteam, By Author, Chronological, By Priority, Open By Due Date, Open By Assignment, Created By Me, Calendar (first time I've seen someone do this), Condensed, Milestones, Assigned To Me, and Keyword Filter. Follows the same approach as the discussion with the views grouping/filtering/etc. around the metadata.
Meetings
A modified Events list with the following views added: By Date, By Category, By Event, Chronological, By Subteam, By Organizer, Created By Me, Condensed, Workspaces, Attended By Me, and Keyword Filter.
Reference Documents
Another modified list (this time a Document Library) with the set of columns and views we're getting tired of reading about (aka same as above).
Views
Something that I don't see enough of in SharePoint customization/configuration/development (which I can do an entire blog on that subject and what each of those mean) is the use of views. The Team Room template makes heavy use of this, not only creating a lot of views on lists but also creating lists of the views.
Each document library or list that has the views (as listed above) also has a list called something like "<ListName> Views". These are just stock Links lists with the URL to each view as it's value. So on the home page, next to each list is the corresponding "Views" list that lets you do a one-click connect to the view directly, rather than having to get the user to go into the list and then pick a view. Such a small thing but a nice touch.
Lookups
As I mentioned, there are a lot of lookups on the site which are hooked into many of the lists. The site uses the following lookup lists:
- Action Item Categories
- Discussion Categories
- Event Profile
- Meeting Categories
- Reference Document Categories
This is a good thing as it makes everything dynamic. Two benefits to this (and something to follow if you're doing similar things in your setups). First, it means easy maintenance. Just add an item to a list and voila, it's available as content somewhere else. Second, you can partition the maintenance of the lookups. Give some lackey the ability to alter content on the lookup lists, but your regular users just have access to the lists using the lookups. It means you won't fall into a trap where someone is modifying a list and "accidently" deletes something. Well, okay, it'll happen but this approach can minimize the goof-ups.
At least the values are in a single list and these values (say Discussion Categories) are used as lookups in various lists as well as values for filtering and grouping. Again, the nice thing with this setup is that you can just change one list and the other values will change across the entire site. An Action Item category needs modification because the domain changed? No problem, just change it in the Action Item Categories list. Need a new category for documents? No problem. Just add it.
Subteam Profiles
I wanted to single this list out as it's really something you rarely see. Jim Duncan has put together the notion of creating a list with related items before (using a Project with Task items). The Subteam Profiles list does the same thing and lets you select a Subteam and display the members relating to that team. Great when you're dealing with a large project that's broken down by group or department and you just want to see a subset of names. You can check it out in action here.
Like I said, this isn't rocket science. I mean, a few hours just creating lists and lookups and Bob's your uncle. It's just nice there's someone out there to create these and offer them for those of you who don't have the time or inclination to put one together for yourself. As always, you can modify this to your hearts content so if you do enhance this or add to it, please let everyone know!
Learn!
The main thing I will tell you from all this blather is to download the templates, install them, and learn. Really. There's a lot here, even if it doesn't look like much. It's not complicated but there are some neat things they've done (for example using the form web part to filter by keywords on the discussion board). Simple things you can with a minimal of effort which can give you some bang for you buck. You can download the Team Room template from here.
If you find this information useful let me know in the comments. Later I'll step through the other two templates, the Document Library and Discussion Board. These again are site templates (not list templates) and have a few "extras" that make them useful. Enjoy!