Customer Demonstrations with SharePoint’s Fantastic 40

In the consultant/presales arena, demonstrations are king.  Being able to customize a demonstration to match a customer’s requirement is even better, but as we know, there isn’t always time for that.  Thankfully, Microsoft have released a number of templates for SharePoint called the “Fantastic 40”.  These templates expand the out-the-box “Team Site” offering to provide a number of very useful sites.  The examples include, but are not limited to:

– Absence and Vacation Schedule Management
– Budgeting and Tracking Multiple Projects
– Bug Database
– Call Center
– Change Request Management
– Compliance Process Support Site
– Contacts Management
– Document Library and Review
– Event Planning
– Expense Reimbursement and Approval Site
– Help Desk

Over and above the “Fantastic 40”, Microsoft have also released role-based templates for My Site that allows you to create your My Site based on the role you have in the organisation. These templates include:

– Administrative Assistant
– All Role-Based Templates
– Controller-Financial Analyst
– Customer Service Manager
– HR Manager
– IT Manager
– Marketing Manager
– Sales Account Managers

What I enjoy about these templates is the fact that they can offer more of a “personalised demontration” to a customer than a demonstration based on the minimal “Team Site” template.

In any event, having a Site Collection with all the templates handily installed is not always possible. Luckily, there are an increasing number of vendors offering preconfigured sites, which means that consultants like myself can use them for demonstration purposes. I recently worked on the SharePoint Experts demonstration site and enjoyed the experience. The “Contributor” right didn’t work, but just being able to navigate through the templates was a great help for me in the field.

So, if you don’t have the time to preconfigure your own virtual machine with all the templates, simply navigate to this site and make use of their offering. Here is the link: http://www.sharepointexperts.com/v3demo.htm

The following site also lists all the templates, and gives screenshots and a brief description of each template: http://www.wssdemo.com/application/default.aspx

And finally, here is a link directly to the TechNet location with more information about the templates and other enhancements: http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/windowsserver/sharepoint/bb407286.aspx

Good luck with your demos 🙂