Microsoft SharePoint 2007 Technologies

106 5.3 Web Content Management

5.3 Web Content Management

As mentioned in Chapter 1, 2007 Microsoft Office System, the Microsoft

Content Management Server (CMS) is not being further evolved. Instead, its

core features for creating, branding, publishing, and managing content-rich

Web sites is included in SharePoint Server 2007—a feature generally referred

to as Web Content Management (WCM). We believe this is a very sensible

move for Microsoft, as it removes a common question about which product

(CMS or SPS 2003) should be used for building Web sites. Now the answer

is clear, since SharePoint Server 2007 has all the tools, features and resources

Figure 5.9

File plan for

Movies.

Figure 5.10

Holds

5.3 Web Content Management 107

Chapter 5

to build, deploy, and manage both internal- and external-facing Web sites, as

well as sites designed for other purposes such as collaboration. Merging these

two products also made sense from a technology point of view in that WSS

provides many core services, such as check-in/check-out, item level security,

and versioning, that are required as a foundation for content-rich Web sites.

So far in this book we have been mainly talking about the team-based,

collaborative sites that SharePoint supports—sites that let users work with

documents and lists and have these displayed in fairly simple Web Part

Pages. When it comes to WCM, we are mainly talking about managing

Web pages as opposed to documents and lists. By managing, we mean the

physical design of such pages with all their supporting controls (style

sheets, images, etc.), the creation and insertion of content into these Web

pages, and the controlled deployment of these Web pages to a read-only

user base. There are three major groups of people involved in this process:

designers create Web page templates, content owners generate the content

and site administrators eventually deploy the Web pages. The Web pages

generally link together to form a Web site. A site that uses all the WCM

features is known as a publishing site, a term we already talked about in

Chapter 1 since the Collaboration Portal site has the publishing feature

enabled.

In this section on ECM we are going to focus on managing the content

and publishing of Web pages. Designing the Web pages is discussed in Chap-

ter 14, Branding Your SharePoint 2007 Sites, where you will learn more

detail about master pages, page layouts, and pages. For now, you need to

understand a couple of basics in this area to be able to make sense of the rest

of this section.

5.3.1 Publishing Site Templates

There are a few flavors of site templates that you can use as a starting point

for your WCM needs. The Web site you see in Figure 5.11 was created via

SharePoint Central Administration using the Publishing Portal template. It is

only available at the root of a Web, but you can also create a blank publishing

site, publishing site with workflow, and a news publishing site as a subsite

inside any form of site collection. I think you will agree that it looks very dif-

ferent from a collaborative team site, and it certainly feels like a “Web site,”

but as you will discover, it uses the same WSS core features (document librar-

ies, lists, content types, etc.) to achieve a different aim.

What you see here is the combination of master pages, page layouts,

and pages with content that is physically stored in the galleries, lists, and

libraries that are provisioned when the site is instantiated. Separation of

content from presentation is key to having a flexible Web site with content