Really portable DTS packages

Ok, I've been asked many a time how I setup DTS pacakges to make them portable. There's been many solutions thrown around the internet, but personally, I don't think any of them making DTS packages really portable. This fine article by Shane Dovers gives a few guidelines, but doesn't show you how it all hangs together. And this article by Kevin Feit sort of goes half way but leaves a lot to be desired in a real world scenario.

My solution to the problem of easily moving DTS packages from environment to environment is based mainly on this Microsoft Best Practices document. Don't be frightened off by the fact that the title says "for Business Intelligence Solutions", even if you are simply loading data into SQL Server, there are a number of DTS gems in this document.

I'm not going to bore you all to death with the details in one huge long post ( I'd have to think up another topic then wouldn't I ) for now. Let me me present the layout of the template package used when creating new packages. Over the next few posts I'll go through the tasks and scripts in the package.