One of the things the SharePoint team has been very focused on the last few months has been with putting together free application templates that you can download and use with Windows SharePoint Services 3.0 (which is the free version of SharePoint that you can download and install on any Windows Server box). 

You can learn more about these application templates here.  Below is a list of some of the templates with custom web parts provided for free download today:

·         Board of Directors

·         Business Performance Reporting

·         Case Management for Government Agencies

·         Classroom Management

·         Clinical Trial Initiation and Management

·         Competitive Analysis Site

·         Discussion Database

·         Disputed Invoice Management

·         Employee Activities Site

·         Employee Self-Service Benefits

·         Employee Training Scheduling and Materials

·         Equity Research

·         Integrated Marketing Campaign Tracking

·         Manufacturing Process Management

·         New Store Opening

·         Product and Marketing Requirements Planning

·         Request for Proposal

·         Sports League

·         Team Work Site

·         Timecard Management

What is great about these templates is that once you download and install them, you can optionally add custom ASP.NET web parts to it, and use standard ASP.NET 2.0 techniques to customize it further.  This makes it dramatically easier to build and deploy common solution applications.