Microsoft has posted a series of templates for Sharepoint sites. Some of these would be suitable for nonprofits. Even if you aren’t into Sharepoint, the templates may give you ideas of what to look for as you develop workflow and and collaboration capabilities for your organization.

If you want to try the templates, there is a 30-day Sharepoint free trail at Sharepointhosting.com. If you are not a Microsoft shop, or if you don’t want to host your Sharepoint site, you can use Sharepointhosting as a service starting at $30.00/month for a gigabyte of storage.

Some of the interesting templates:

• Board of Directors
  The Board of Directors application template provides a single location for an external group of members to store and locate common documents such as quarterly reviews, shareholder meeting notes and annual strategy documents. The template also tracks tasks, issues and calendar items so board members have a single location to view information relevant to them.
• Clinical Trial Initiation and Management
  The Clinical Trial Initiation and Management application template helps teams manage the process of tracking clinical trial protocols, objective setting, subject selection and budget activities. The site provides useful Office Word 2007 templates as well as the capability to create, track and assign tasks and issues related to a particular clinical trial.
• Discussion Database
  The Discussion Database application template provides a location where team members can create and reply to discussion topics. Discussions are organized by categories, which are created by a site manager, and can be linked to Office Outlook 2007 via an RSS feed.
• Integrated Marketing Campaign Tracking
  The Integrated Marketing Campaign Tracking application template helps marketing managers track the implementation and success of outbound marketing activities. The template allows a manager to create marketing activities and track the results of those activities, such as responses generated and sales completed. The template contains multiple methods of analyzing the success of the campaigns including automated calculations and Office Excel 2007 templates for more detailed analyses.
• Team Work Site
  The Team Work Site application template provides a place where project teams can upload background documents, track scheduled calendar events and submit action items that result from team meetings. The site also tracks the creation and purpose of ‘sub-teams’ as well as enables discussion of topics created by members of the team.
• Timecard Management
  The Timecard Management application template helps teams track hours spent working on various projects. The site enables team members to ‘punch in’ on a particular project and ‘punch out’ when they cease work. The system automatically generates the time worked by project, and can show managers who is working on a particular project, total hours versus budgeted time and the details of who worked on a each project entered into the site.
• Room and Equipment Reservations
  The Room and Equipment Reservations application template helps teams manage the utilization of shared meeting rooms and equipment. The application template enables team members to identify times when specific rooms and/or equipment are available and place a reservation for a specified time.
• Lending Library
  The Lending Library application template helps people manage the physical assets in an organization’s library. The application template tracks general properties about the physical assets and which user has currently checked out the asset. It also provides a librarian dashboard to help identify currently available and overdue assets. Automated email notifications can be sent to borrowers who have an overdue item.

More of these are located here.