Wednesday 22 October 2008

Document Libraries: which template?

This seems to be a topic that stumps even the most highly paid SharePoint experts but needn't. After all, the MOSS UI offers everything most enterprises would need, it's just a case of knowing where to look and exercising some not-so-common-sense.

Despite being called MOSS 2007, the base document content types actually use the old Office file formats. Confused? Yep, this is where most people get tripped up. The easiest way to replace these is to create a new document in each of Word, PowerPoint and Excel and upload them for each relevant content type under Advanced Settings -> Document Template.

This will provide you with a good base for any future content types that inherit from these.

DON'T save them as templates, as one might expect. Just as plain .docx, .pptx and .xlsx files. This is another common mistake.

These files will automatically get copied to the content type and every existing and new library to which it has been applied. If you're really curious you can verify this by looking in the hidden Forms folder within any library using the content type.

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