Professional Team Foundation Server

10.5. Incorporating Your SharePoint Design in a Custom Process Template

You now have a choice: You can customize each site on a one-by-one basis or you can save your work as a SharePoint site template and associate it to your process template. The latter option makes sense if you are planning to reuse a process template repeatedly. It saves you from having to take the manual steps to customize the look and feel after creating each project portal. Here are the steps to create a site template file.

1. Open your customized team portal.

2. Click Site Settings.

3. Click Go to Site Administration on the Administration menu.

4. Under Management and Statistics, click Save Site as Template.

5. You will now have the option of creating a new file name for your custom template (filename.stp). You can also add in a template title and description.

   NOTE

   We recommend that you omit any spaces from your template file name.

6. There is a check box on the form that says Include content. This will include all the files that are currently part of your team portal. If you think that you will reuse all the same files on the portal every time you create a Team Project, click the check box. Otherwise, leave it unchecked.

7. Your template has now been saved.

Here are the instructions to obtain a copy of the site template as a .stp file. The .stp file is actually a .cab (Cabinet) file that contains an XML manifest describing the structure of the site and a collection of compressed files with your template's assets. Follow these steps: ...