Shane Young (www.sharepoint911.com) will join us for a very special presentation as we resume regularly scheduled monthly meetings.

Session Overview:
In this session Shane will walk you through common mistakes made during the installation process of SharePoint and give you some tips on keeping your server running in tip-top shape. No death by PowerPoint but more of a hands on review of the server and Central Admin. He may also sneak in some nuggets to help you plan for the future….

PLEASE NOTE: This is a virtual event that is available live online so anyone can attend. It’s just like any other user group meeting but you can connect from anywhere and well…there is no free pizza at the end.

Updated June 8th, 2009

A big HUGE thank you to Shane Young for the presentation he delivered last week.  As always he did a superb job despite some annoying audio problems that we encountered in the beginning. We will have those ironed out in time for our next presentation.

In the meantime, for those looking to view the recording of his presentation, the information is below.

SharePoint Nation! - Virtual UG Meeting #3 - SharePoint Installations
Recording URL: https://www.livemeeting.com/cc/mvp/view
Recording ID: WGTQ6D
Attendee Key: spn3 

The next version of Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 will be Microsoft SharePoint Server 2010.  No more Office in the name though as Tom Rizzo points out on the SharePoint blog, that has no reflection or impact on the platform’s ability to work with Office applications.  In my opinion, I think it shows how widely SharePoint is integrated with all aspects of a business and not just a productivity suite.

Check out more details here…

My presentation will center around SharePoint tips and tricks for usage on an Intranet.  As with most of my presentations, the goal isn’t just to show you WHAT SharePoint can do but how you should use certain features to gain better benefits for business.  I will be covering topics such as branding, electronic forms, workflow and reporting along with my usual advice around establishing governance and solid document management procedures.

Plus in addition to seeing my presentation, you can also check out another presentation by Mike Maadarani on Web Content Management and how SharePoint can be used to run your Internet site.

So if you are in Ottawa on April 30th, I invite you to come check us out.  You can read more details and sign up here!

I had a fantastic time while there as it was great to meet up with old friends and make some new connections.  Plus the weather was an absolute treat since San Diego has a much nicer climate than Newfoundland this time of year (or any time of year for that matter). 

I was very grateful to the conference organizers for flying me out there and having me participate in such a great event.  The quality of the conference was top notch and I got the impression from speaking to attendees that they were very happy with the entire event.

As promised, linked below are my slidedecks from both sessions.  I hope those that attended will find these useful. For those that did not, you may not get the whole story from the slidedecks as there was a great deal of explanation and discussion around each slide and the demos but feel free to drop me a question on anything via the comments feature of this blog.

Session IA354 - Managing Documents the Right Way

Session IW233 - Using the Right Method to Collect Information

Once again, thanks to everyone that attended and hope to see you all again at a future event.

What is it?
This conference goes beyond the how-to’s of SharePoint and delves into real world issues facing successful SharePoint implementations. Learn how to:

• Make consistent, confident decisions at every level, across your enterprise.
• Break the cycle of avoidance, disagreement and ignorance that leads to subpar results.
• Eliminate design, deployment, organizational and administrative confusion.
• Apply effective SharePoint decision-making in any situation and in turn enhance enterprise communication, collaboration and efficiency - while significantly lowering cost.
• Replace disorder with clarity, direction and confidence.

Who should attend?
The conference sessions are divided into 6 tracks in order to accommodate topics for SharePoint professionals at every level:

• IT Pro
• Developers and Designers
• Information Worker
• Information Architect/Taxonomist
• Project Manager
• Chief Information Officer

My first session on Tuesday morning focuses on identifying the optimal method for collecting information from users based on your specific requirements.  I find this can often be any area where those starting out at designing solutions might take a wrong turn and select the wrong product / method to suit their situation.  Then I will be presenting again on Wednesday on a session geared around best practices for document management. 

If you are attending, please drop me a line or a comment.  It would be great to see you there!  I also plan on having a few extra copies of our book to hand out while we are there since a lot of what I will cover has already been covered in there.

My fiance, Shane had mentioned he had purchased a nice present for me this year.  I was intrigued but also felt I didn’t really need anything specific.  While we are not well off or rich by any means, we are extremely happy and have most things that we could ever want.  So when I woke up and went downstairs to get my coffee, I saw a birthday card and rose on the kitchen table.  Thinking that was a sweet gesture, I assumed that was everything and was happy to continue with my day.

Then Shane handed me a letter confirming the purchase of a holiday hamper of…2 goats, 8 chicks, 1 donkey and 1 pack of rice.  These objects are available for purchase (via donation) at www.chf-partners.ca and will be given to people in need all around the world in poverty stricken areas such as Ethiopia and Bangladesh.  For example, donkeys are provided to female headed households to assist with carrying of water, firewood and other challenging chores.  The goats provide a source of sustainable food and income to families in need.  In short, a simple birthday gift to me has the potential to help multiple people in a way unlike anything I have ever done before. 

Needless to say I was moved and feel strongly that this is by far the best present I could have ever received.  I feel so grateful that I have a fiance that is so thoughful and loving and also that we are lucky enough to be given an opportunity to help others with money that could have easily been spent on a video game, fancy meal or other insignificant item.

So my reason for posting this is to let others know about this program and hopefully enlighten someone else to offer a similar gift to a person they love.  I can assure you that it doesn’t take much to really make someone’s day and with the holidays approaching, it might be just the answer you are looking for.

More information available at:

http://www.chf-partners.ca/giftsthatmatter/main.html 

Live Meeting Address: https://www.livemeeting.com/cc/mvp/join?id=MNS7Q6&role=attend&pw=Tg%28f%7Eg5cM 

Add to Calendar

Session Information:
Document retention is an important part of content management.  SharePoint provides out-of-the-box support for managing document retention using the built-in expiration policy feature of the information management policy framework.  The built-in expiration policy feature includes the ability to define expiration formulas based on document metadata, but there are many scenarios in which the expiration date depends on conditions external to a given document.  In this session, we’ll explore the information management policy architecture in detail and learn how to extend the expiration policy feature by writing custom document expiration formulas that calculate the expiration date based on data pulled from elsewhere in the SharePoint farm.

A little background on SharePoint Nation!
User groups are a great way for getting out to meet peers, share information on past experiences related to a particular topic and to learn from subject matter experts on new concepts or best practices.  Many of us already are members of local user groups related to SharePoint, .NET and other topics.  However in some cases, it may be difficult to get out to meetings due to work commitments or even worse, impossible to coordinate a group due to regional limitations.  Enter SharePoint Nation…a virtual user group.
SharePoint Nation will operate as any other user group…except without the free Pizza.
We will meet, share information and network with one another.  Meetings will feature presentations from a variety of subject matter experts on a vast array of topics.  To accommodate people from all over the globe, a variety of time slots will be followed for meetings and all content will be made available online for on demand participation.  The website will be used for sharing information with one another between meetings.

How can you get involved…
Aside from presenting at meetings, we are looking for people to help host the meetings.  As a host you will take on responsibility for notifying attendees of meeting locations, introducing the speaker for the evening and collecting evaluations at the conclusion of the meeting.   Training will be provided on using Live Meeting and the various other tools associated with hosting and presenting at meetings. 
 

In this meeting, Robert Bogue (MOSS MVP) will speak to us on Governance. Robert is a definite expert in this area and will make this an event you will not want to miss!

Live Meeting Address: https://www.livemeeting.com/cc/mvp/join?id=snug01&role=attend&pw=HzMS%284gPx

Session Information:

Are you having trouble getting folks interested in SharePoint? Is SharePoint out of control in your organization? Have you experienced SharePoint sprawl? In this session you’ll get a framework for governance on SharePoint. You’ll learn how to balance evangelism with economics. You’ll discover how guidance may be more effective at governance for creating a healthy ecosystem.

A little background on SharePoint Nation!

User groups are a great way for getting out to meet peers, sharing information on past experiences related to a particular topic and for learning from subject matter experts on new concepts or best practices.  Many of us already are members of local user groups related to SharePoint, .NET and other topics.  However in some cases, it may be difficult to get out to meetings due to work commitments or even worse, impossible to coordinate a group due to regional limitations.  Enter SharePoint Nation…a virtual user group.

SharePoint Nation will operate as any other user group…except without the free Pizza.

We will meet, share information and network with one another.  Meetings will feature presentations from a variety of subject matter experts on a vast array of topics.  To accommodate people from all over the globe, a variety of time slots will be followed for meetings and all content will be made available online for on demand participation.  The website will be used for sharing information with one another between meetings.

How can you get involved…

Aside from presenting at meetings, we are looking for people to help host the meetings.  As a host you will take on responsibility for notifying attendees of meeting locations, introducing the speaker for the evening and collecting evaluations at the conclusion of the meeting.   Training will be provided on using Live Meeting and the various other tools associated with hosting and presenting at meetings. 

Joel Oleson’s SharePoint Groups, Permissions, Site Security, and Depreciated Site Groups

These updates include bug fixes, performance enhancements as well as new functionality and features around Search.  According to the blog post, it is recommended that all customers install these updates to take advantage of the improvements immediately.

Check out the details here.

I will be doing some updates over the next few days on my own machines as well I am sure we will be patching our many development environments at work.  I will post any personal findings and experiences as they become available.

I spent the first 2 days of the conference hanging out in the Office / SharePoint TLC area and I met some really great people.  It absolutely blew my mind how many people I was talking to that were just getting into SharePoint in their orgs and are loving the tool.  It was a great opportunity to chat, share stories and answer some good questions with peers.  Most of all it was just great to meet some new people and of course see some familiar faces.  

I must admit I was also very happily surprised at the number of people that mentioned they have our book and are really enjoying it.  While I know that sort of thing isn’t supposed to matter to a “real” author, it always makes me feel good that people are finding it helpful and that those 8 months of writing our hearts out day and night were worth it. 

Unfortunately however I couldn’t spend as much time with my fellow SharePoint community friends as I had planned or would have liked.  I spent the first part of the week trying to catch up on work in the evenings and early mornings before the conference and then my week was cut short due to an unfortunate family tragedy that had me hanging low in my hotel room for a while and then out on the first possible flight home.  Sometimes there really is no better place than home and so while my trip was shorter than I had planned, it was definitely for the best.

So if I didn’t see you, hopefully we will catch up at the next big event.  In the meantime, I see that my fellow SharePoint Nation comrades did a great job at tearing up the town.  A major hat off (cowboy hat that is) to Eric Shupps for winning Speaker Idol during the Dev week.  Way to do us proud Eric.  I had planned on participating in Week 2 but ended up giving up my spot.  Maybe next year or else i will just wait till the Canadian version comes around. 

We had planned since he announced the concert to only attend tonight’s show which is the first show that was announced. Today is both Shane’s birthday as well as Dylan’s. So we figured what could be more fitting than seeing him play on the day they share as a milestone. Then last night came, we finished work and thought….what the heck are we doing going home when Bob Dylan is playing here in town on the same night. So we sped downtown, found some tickets (great seats too) and had just an amazing night of mind blowing music and a fantastic show.

When we first arrived, we were just both numb with excitement. Our seats were just 12 back from the stage and we could see him perfectly. The band sounded amazing. The second song was an all time favorite of mine, Girl From the North Country (also known as Girl of the North Country). I loved that song from the early album but also the version that he performed with Johnny Cash. I listen to it all the time and often watch the video of his appearance with Cash on YouTube. Then I watched last night’s performance and it completely blew my mind. Typically I am about as emotional as a frozen turnip, but my eyes actually filled up as the song played on and I was sure at that moment, there was nowhere else I wanted to be but there. The night continued with an amazing mix of oldies and songs from the Modern Times album including Beyond the Horizon which is a personal favorite of mine from that album.

We are getting ready now to continue on with our Dylan weekend. We have a room booked in the hotel that connects to Mile One and some friends joining us for a some birthday festivities. I feel pretty confident that tonight will be even more amazing and I truly cannot wait!

We have experienced considerable growth over the past 12 months and are looking for more talented people to come join our team. Right now all of the positions are based in St. John’s, NL so that would require you to be from this area or interested in relocating here. That’s right, while many complain that they must leave the Province and go West to get employment, we have been actually bringing people back East to Newfoundland.

Positions currently open include:

• Senior Project Manager (7-10+ years experience managing IT Projects)
• Business Analysts
• Sales Lead
• SharePoint Specialists
• Application Developers (ASP.NET, SharePoint)

If you are interested in coming to work for us and would like to submit a resume, you can do so by either going to our website at www.infotechsolutions.com or by sending an email with your resume attached to careers@infotechsolutions.com.

I started by rebuilding our domain controller as the last one had been in service for a few years and the DNS configuration I had going on was a bit messed up and thus causing some pain and confusion on the internal network.  I also used this as an excuse to introduce Windows Server 2008 as the dc since it made sense to go with the latest and greatest. 

Overall I have to say it was a super simplistic setup and things are a million times better.  I completely ditched my ISP’s DNS and have an OpenDNS forwarding rule setup on the server which is much better for the external links.  Plus I removed the double DNS references on the internal network so everything is much faster now. 

Probably the thing that pleases me most is how well the Macs are responding to the new setup.  I was amazed at how easy it was to join them to the domain.  Things have significantly improved from a networking / integration perspective over the past 3-4 years since I had last been using a Mac on a regular basis.  The one thing that I did wrong that I forgot to do when first binding my laptop to the domain was select the option to create a mobile account.  Once I figured that out, it made my profile available even when the domain was not.  This is a necessity of course when one spends a large amount of time on the road or away from the house.

Since setting up the new DC, I have also repaved each of the client systems and upgraded to Vista SP1 which has resulted in a much better experience overall.  I even went as far as rebuilding our SharePoint server and a created a bunch of new base VMs.  The only system outstanding is my Media Center which I have been procrastinating on.  Hopefully I will get that one done tomorrow.

Productivity feels good!!

So one of our biggest goals this year (besides the wedding which is still in the planning stages), was to go see Bob play no matter where that was. If there was a show, we were buying plane tickets or hitching the trailer onto the truck for a road trip. But then out of the blue something strange and awesome happened. Though Bob Dylan had not yet added any other North American dates to his tour page, it was announced he was coming to Atlantic Canada!!! What is even more exciting is…Bob Dylan is going to be playing here on May 24th…Shane and Bob’s birthday.

Needless to say we got tickets and it is gonna be the BEST birthday party ever! I have even gone as far as creating a Facebook group for the night. If you are in Newfoundland and Labrador and are going to the Bob Dylan Concert (aka Shane and Bob’s birthday party), sign up.

INETA is a volunteer run community organization that requires a large amount of time from those that run it.  In many ways the role as President had turned into a second full time job for me and that was having an impact on my ability to spend time with family, pursue new opportunities and focus on other projects and activities.  So while the decision was not an easy one, I feel confident it was the right one for me at this point in my life.  I still completely respect and support what INETA is all about and look forward to working with them again in the future after I have had some time to refocus and regroup.

Over the past month, I have been working at transitioning my duties to other board members and today we elected Daniel Egan as my replacement.  Daniel is a fantastic leader and all around great guy.  He is extremely passionate about the community will do a wonderful job in his new role.  I couldn’t be happier for both him and the organization.

Does this mean I am giving up on the community?  Not at all!  In fact it just means that I will be more focused over the next while and have more time available for doing other things that I have not been able to do for quite a while such as blogging and writing.  In addition, I will have more time focus on SharePoint specific projects over the next while that Shane and I have had sitting on a shelf.  The fun is really only yet beginning. 

While the functionality is broken into a set of features, I should note that these features are very interdependant so it’s not like you can turn on 1 and not the others to selectively choose what functionality you want to take advantage of.  However recognizing the desire that many would have for such an option, the Records Management team did note on their blog that they would be releasing code samples in the coming weeks that should allow developers to identify how they can accomplish certain individual portions of functionality.  You can view the announcement article here.

I personally have been diving deep in the area of Records Management over the past 3-4 months as it seems to be an area many of our customers that have previously deployed MOSS as an Intranet or Collaborative environment are now interested in.  It makes a lot of sense that organizations would eventually question investments into separate systems for producing, managing and sharing their content.  Providing a single environment and interface for the management and sharing of content throughout its entire lifecycle is a definite win / win for everyone in the organization.  I hope to post some helpful articles and posts over the next month or so in this area as it may be the easiest way for me to finally get back on the blogging train with something useful.

If you have any specific suggestions of posts you would like to see, then leave me a comment here and I will do my best to get to it.

Overall it was a great year but it had its challenges.  Particularly in the work / life balance side of things.  Shane (my fiance, co-worker, housemate and pretty much complete partner of any thing important) had a similarly challenging and productive year.  As a result, we both decided to put off things such as home renovations, healthy living as well as planning our wedding and as a result still haven’t really made much progress.  A phenomenum most people around us cannot understand.  Looking back on things I am beginning to question our priorities.  It seems I always manage to have a fierce dedication to getting things done on the work side of things and then continuously put things off on the personal front. 

So as I head into 2008, I am acknowledging that at my current age, I am old enough to know better and young enough to make the changes that are necessary.  This is going to likely lead to some drastic changes but hopefully the type of changes that will allow me to continue steady progress in my professional life but equally or greater progress in my personal development and goals as well. 

Wish me luck!!

A good start was given to Shane and I by a special friend, that I am hoping might represent the next best step for getting things on track.  Thanks Dana!

Quote from article:

“What is the best thing that has happened since you have become an MVP?

I got engaged since becoming an Microsoft Most Valuable Professional (MVP), so that outranks all professional accomplishments.  In terms of big accomplishments professionally though, the release of my book with Amanda Murphy, “Beginning SharePoint 2007” is something I am pretty proud of.”

I was impressed to see that he considered our engagement the greatest accomplishment he has had in the past year and then it was the release of our book.  Good to see he has his priorities right.  =-)

For a while, I was feeling a little burned out from writing after the book project. It was a great experience but I found that it took it’s toll on my whole work / life balance. Basically for 8 months, Shane and I became accustomed to working our day jobs and then coming home and writing for anywhere between 4-8 hours a night. Sometimes after a long day, it can be very challenging to think clearly enough to write about a topic. To help we would often go to our favorite coffee shop for a couple of hours in between to write so that it didn’t seem so repetitive. Plus during the time I was traveling a lot for work so that made things even tougher. So needless to say when we were done, there was a serious need for some R&R.

So that is what we did…

We went out and brought a new truck and a camper and spent whatever moments we could outside under the stars and next to a camp fire. We finally got to spend some time kicking back and having fun together as a couple rather than merely being co-workers or book writing partners. It was an amazing summer and I may have even set a new record for number of hours spent offline. Well as offline as one can get with a Windows Mobile phone that is always connected but you get the idea.

Now that the ground is starting to freeze and preparing to turn a shade of white for the next 4-5 months, I will be spending more time inside and consequently writing. For a while I was having a hard time thinking of things to write since we covered so much in the book. Now I have collected a pile of topics that act as extensions or further details to those topics covered that I am looking forward to putting into something people can benefit here on my blog. As always if you have any requests for things you would like to see covered, please use my comments.

On the top level site of a Collaboration Portal publishing site, which is the site many of us use as a starting point for a Corporate Intranet, there is a list called Reusable Content.

From this list you can create list items that contain text that you can later insert into portal pages via the Publishing Content control. So the next question you might have is, why would I want to do that? The goal of reusable content really can be narrowed down to two main scenarios:

1. You may have text within your organization that is very standardized and should never change. Therefore whenever someone displays it on the portal, it should always look exactly the same. This might be a corporate mission statement, an executive bio, product description, corporate policy etc… This is also typically content that would be displayed in multiple locations so the goal would to minimize efforts associated with maintenance. Using the reusable content feature of MOSS 2007, the content owner can update the text or display of this content in a single list and it would push all changes out to each place in the portal where the content is displayed.
2. You may also have text that serves more as a template to demonstrate to portal managers how content should be formatted. Perhaps it is a welcome message to a divisional portal homepage or boilerplate description text for a product that will act as a starting point for more defined and relevant information. In this case, the goal is to have a text snippet or blurb that a site manager can insert onto their page and then modify to suit their specific needs. By having the snippet of starting text, you can help kickstart their content creation efforts and minimize the time it will take for someone to add content to the page.

So to get started with either of the above scenarios, you need to start by going to the Reusable Content list on the top level site of your publishing site collection. You can get there by select View All Site Content from the Quick Launch of your top level site’s home page. This will take you to the content listing page where you can then select your Reusable Content list.

From this list, you can select to create either an entry that is full rich HTML or simple standard text. For this example, let’s select HTML.

You can then proceed to create a new item in the list containing whatever content you wish to display. In this case, I have chosen to create a short snippet dedicated to displaying the bio of a very important individual in our organization. I want to display this bio in multiple locations in our portal so therefore I am selecting automatic update so that whenever I need to make a change, I can do it from the list and it will automatically update all pages that contain this information. If I did not select the automatic update option, I would have the ability to edit the text directly from whatever page I added it to.

When I am finished with my entry, I select OK and notice that the item now appears in my list. I can then go to any publishing page in the portal with the publishing HTML content control and add the reference to my Executive Bio. When you edit a publishing page and select inside a HTML content control, you will see the following toolbar appear. From this toolbar you can select the reusable content icon that is shown below.

When you select the reusable content icon, a new window will appear asking you to select which piece of content you would like to insert. In my example, I only have the one item but over time you could actually end up with many entries in this list. Therefore you may want to consider proper categorization and classification of these items to support custom views of this list to make selection easier for either yourself or your portal content managers.

Once you select your content item and click the OK button, it will be dropped into your page exactly as seen on the preview.

You will notice that if you selected the Automatic Update option, you will not be able to edit the content once it has been added to page. You will instead be required to return to your reusable content list to make an update.

Top Level Collaboration Portal Search Box

Top Level Team Site Search Box

A reader of our book asked a great question in our forums on how to add the link if you have a team site as the top level site in your site collection. I supplied a quick answer in forum but then realized it might be a good topic to post about in more detail here.

Basically to get started, in order to use the Advanced Search, you need to have a page from which to perform your query and then another to display the search results. MOSS 2007 has page layouts / template for each of these as well as provides you with customizable web parts if you want to create everything completely from scratch to suit your specific requirements. However the quickest route would be for you to create a sub site on your team site using the Search Center template as this site template already contains the elements you require. This is the same template that is used for the search site in the Collaboration portal which many organizations use as the starting point for their Corporate Intranet. The steps for doing so are described below.

1. From the home page of your top level team site, select Create from the Site Actions menu.
2. Select Sites and Workspaces from the Web Pages category.
3. Fill in the details for your new site. Be sure to select the Search Center template under the Enterprise tab. Also it is a good idea to inherit permissions of your top level site since you would likely want to ensure all users of top level site will be able to access the advanced search interface.

    

   

    

4. Click the Create button to complete the creation of your new search site.
5. You will be redirected to the home page of your new search site. The page will be displaying a search box with a link to the Advanced Search page.

    

   

6. Click the Advanced Search link.
7. From the Advanced Search page, copy the url of the page.
8. Select Site Settings from the Site Actions menu.
9. Because you are on a sub site to your top level site where the majority of site collection settings exist, you need to then select Go to Top Level Site Settings.
10. Select Search Settings.

     

    

     

11. Select the top option and paste in the url that you copied in step 7. The url should end with /{the url name of your search site}/advanced.aspx.

     

    

     

12. Click OK.
13. When you return to the home page of your team site, you will now see the Advanced Search link and clicking it will bring you to the Advanced Search page.

Creating a Template Part in InfoPath 2007

Open InfoPath 2007 and select to Design a Form Template

You are given a choice to create either a complete form or a template part.  Because the component you are going to create will be used in multiple forms, it makes sense to package it as a template part instead.  In this example, I will create a template part for contact information since it is contained in probably half the forms I make.  Even if some slight items change, using a template part will give me a good starting point.

By selecting template part, you are given a choice to create from a blank template or based on an XML document or schema.  In this case we will select Blank.

You design your form by adding the appropriate layout tables and controls to the form.  It is always a good idea to begin this step with a sketched out idea of what your form will look like on paper and the data the form will collect including any dependencies or connections identified.

Similar to a complete template, you can import data from other data sources such as SQL, web services or SharePoint.  In this case, I have a list of provinces contained on a centrally available SharePoint site so I will utilize that.  You never know when Canada could decide to recruit a new province or territory so its important to make it easy for this listing to stay up to date.  OK So maybe in this case I just hate typing so it’s easier for me to grab this information from a central listing somewhere.

After all my labels and controls have been added, I am ready to save my template part.

When you save the template part you will notice it has its own unique file extension (xtp) rather than the xsn you would see if you were saving a complete form.

Now whenever I want to create a form that contains contact information, I can simply add my template part instead of recreating every single field manually.  Who has time for manual recreation of common elements when there are Stanley Cup Finals or World Cup Soccer games to watch? 

Below the controls listing on the task pane select the link to “Add or Remove Custom Controls…”

Select Template Part from the wizard screen…

Browse to the location of your template part.  If you are working on a team, then it would be a good idea to store these in a central location so as to be a library for everyone to use.

And Voila you have a new custom control available to you in the task pane.

Just like any other control, click and drag it onto the form to make it appear.  

Depending on the complexity of your template part, you can evaluate the benefit of using template parts by comparing the length of time it takes to click and drag versus the length of time it took you to add all the controls and set up your data connection, then multiply it by the number of times you would typically have to add those fields to a form.