Minor Oversight in Ten Themes for Sharepoint

The 10 new Sharepoint themes that were released in March are absolutely great. They really give Sharepoint sites a different feel. However they have been released with a minor flaw. There is no styling for the Calendar! I don’t know if this was an oversight or what but the calendars still have the default blue coloring.

I suggest grabbing Heather Solomon’s Calendar CSS and include in any site where you plan to use these themes.

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Fab 40 templates and why I’m starting to dislike them

So in theory the Fab 40 pack of Sharepoint templates seem pretty nice. They provide predefined templates to help resolve business processes. Great, well not so much. I thought these would be great for our environment to help end users solve some basic needs. Before I rant, I just want to say that I appreciate the efforts of those that made these templates and thank them for making them available for free to WSS and MOSS users.

One of the first templates to get deployed was the Employee Training template to help resolve a complex registration system for faculty seminars. After some major rework, this will be great. The template deploys with a few bugs as detailed by Paul Galvin and several other outlets. These are fixes on top of other customizations that need to be done.

The next template to be deployed was the case management template. It’s ok, no bugs, just a lot customizations and some bad design choices. Case in point, the Department for a new case. This should have been defined as a look up column instead of a single line of text. This structure allows users to specify different iterations of the same department on how they choose to enter the data. Enforcing uniform data by using a choice column type or preferably a look up list would allow for uniform data input.

The time spend going through and redesigning the structure, template calls and customizations is not worth the effort I am seeing. The best approach is to use these templates as a baseline for end users. If a user likes the Lending Library template, open it up analyze what it does and build a new site collection from scratch employing good design practices. In the long run, it’ll take less time getting the site up from scratch instead of reworking someone else’s vision of how your business practice will work.

What I’d like to see out of this is the templates brought down, redesigned/fixed and redeployed so that that are more usable out of the box.

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