Collaborate enables system administrators to create site templates, which can serve as the basis when creating new sites. When a new site is requested, instead of creating it from scratch, a site creator can use one of these templates as a starting point.
Site templates make it easy to reuse common site structures and can vastly increase the productivity of using Collaborate through minimising the time spent configuring new sites. Site templates also encourage the use of site best practices that have been developed by Collaborate experts.
A site template can determine almost every aspect of how a new site will look and behave, including:
- General site configuration settings
- Which modules are enabled and how each module is configured (for example, if autonumbering is enabled in the Files module etc.)
- Security groups on the site and the access rights the groups have to site content; this includes system groups added to the site
- The users on the site and any roles that they have
- The structure of folders in the Files module
- Categories in the Events and Blog modules
- Lists in the Tasks module
- Q&A topics
- The Home module
- Workflow rule configuration
- Approval templates configuration
- iSheets, including columns and views, but without data
- HighQ Forms configuration
- Contract Express configuration, including the CE templates associated with a site and their linked iSheet mapping and Output iSheets
- Document Intelligence configuration, including folder settings and iSheet column mapping configuration
However, any content that is added to a site template will not be included in a site that is created based on the template, including:
- Files and attachments
- Wiki pages, blog posts, events and tasks
- iSheet data
Note that there is a separate iSheet template feature that permits the re-use of one or a group of related iSheet designs.
After a site has been created from a template, the new site’s configuration can be altered and will no longer be connected to the template. If the template that site was based on were to be changed in the future, that would not have any impact on any sites previously created from that template.
Site templates can be created in one of two ways:
- From scratch, just like creating a new site
- Based on an existing site. For example, if the Project Delta M&A site was tweaked until it had the ideal structure for every M&A transaction, then that site could be used as the starting point for a new “M&A Site Template”
