Imagine building a SharePoint Site for managing a book collection. You would need that Site to store information about: books, authors, publishers, storage locations and meta data (search criteria).

After you finish designing the Site you will start using it and of course you will discover things to improve. SharePoint will make it easy to implement changes.

Now that your Site is a success you see that someone needs to manage a collection of software CDs. You would think that they could use your book collection Site as a sample. Sure, that would be good.

SharePoint offers a better alternative. It lets you save your Site as a template so other could reproduce exact copies in few seconds. Now your company could start using your Site Template as a base for organizing books, documents, CDs, equipment and many other things. That is productive and effective.

SharePoint will transform your Site in one file with extension “.stp”. That means that your site template can be named: collections_site.stp

An additional benefit of working with templates is that they can be deployed in any SharePoint environment easily. That means that you could share or sell the template to others that use the same version of SharePoint you use.

For complex sites there are some considerations. Feel free to contact me if you need some support.