Notes Migrator for SharePoint is great at provisioning lists, libraries or even entire SharePoint sites from your custom templates.  This is incredibly useful when migrating lots of custom Notes applications that are based on the same Notes template (or at least share a common design).  For example, I have one customer who has 10,000 team sites based on a completely customized Notes template and is migrating them to 10,000 SharePoint sites based on a highly customized site template.  Now that’s code reuse!

Quest’s Web Parts for SharePoint product is one great way to build those custom application templates.  As described previously [link] this tool has been very popular for companies wanting to “replatform” their custom Notes applications because the web parts help to reproduce much of the functionality of typical Notes applications without having to write much code.  For companies with lots of custom applications, the cost savings add up very quickly.

Until recently, however, it was a tad tedious to reuse templates containing Quest web parts to migrate large numbers of applications.  The problem was that you had to first use Notes Migrator for SharePoint to provision/migrate the list and then you had to manually configure the web parts to work on that specific instance. 

The new release of Web Parts for SharePoint, version 5.1 [link], contains a small feature that solves this problem in a big way.  When you use the list form, list view, discussion view, etc, you can simply use “.” as the Site URL and “.” as the List Name. This makes it work without reconfiguration when you save your list (or site) as a template and then instantiate it.  The following screen shot shows how I replaced the default view in AllItems.aspx page of my Discussion Board template with a Quest web part that is configured to always work with “the current list”:

In a more complex application, I would probably customize the list item display/edit pages (newform.aspx, editform.aspx, dispform.aspx) as well.  I might even add additional pages if I wanted a multi-step process, different pages for different audiences, etc.  Regardless, when I was done, I would save it as a custom list template (or site template) and then I could reuse that template as many times as I needed to.

It is a simple matter to tell Notes Migrator for SharePoint to use your custom template when provisioning new lists or sites in SharePoint.  For lists, you basically need to set the “Maps to List Types” property in your migration job’s Target Data Definition.  In the following screen shot, Notes Migrator for SharePoint will provision my “Quest Discussion Board” template if it exists on the target site collection, otherwise it will provision a plain “Discussion Board” template, etc.

For provisioning entire sites using your custom site template, you can specify the site template you want to use in the “Plan new SharePoint subsite” dialog.  You can do this one at a time for specific Notes applications, or you can make it an automatic rule for handling all applications of a specific type, as shown in the following screen shot: