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Table of Contents

Introduction
Microsoft® Windows® SharePoint® Services 3.0 is a technology of Windows Server® that offers an integrated portfolio of collaboration and communication services. It is also a platform for developing Web-based business applications. Taking advantage of this capability, Microsoft has developed forty Application Templates to provide out-of-the-box solutions to address the needs of specific business processes such as coordinating a Help Desk or tracking marketing campaigns, as shown in the example in figure 1.
Microsoft developed these freely downloadable application templates to be usable immediately after deployment. However, customers and partners can also use these application templates as the starting point for more customized solutions, or they can use them as teaching examples as they build their own sophisticated Windows SharePoint Services applications using Microsoft Office SharePoint Designer 2007.
The purpose of this paper is to describe how Microsoft developed the application templates, identifying best practices for how to work with core capabilities within both Windows SharePoint Services and SharePoint Designer, with the goal of empowering customers and partners to create their own applications. The paper is not a substitute for the Windows SharePoint Services 3.0 SDK, nor is it primarily a developer resource. Developers should use the SDK for understanding generally how to extend Windows SharePoint Services 3.0.
This paper is meant to be a resource for a new breed of site designers. Because Windows SharePoint Services and SharePoint Designer make it possible to build so much application functionality through the UI, advanced development skills are not required to build rich applications. To be sure, this paper does describe some custom code implementations for particularly tricky design patterns, but the overall methodology should be accessible to non-developers and is presented with that audience in mind. Developers may want to quickly read through the early sections on tools and methodology and pay more attention to the description of the design patterns and the specific examples of how to implement those design patterns.
In terms of paper structure, the first section provides an overview of the capabilities within Windows SharePoint Services 3.0 and SharePoint Designer that are used in building applications. The next section describes, in general, the methodology that Microsoft used across all of the application templates. The methodology is a common-sense approach that leads to a real examination