SharePoint 2007: The Definitive Guide

Enterprise Content Management

Web content management was previously covered by Microsoft's Content Management Server 2002. With the release of MOSS 2007, the realm of web content management is now rolled into SharePoint. Organizations now have a cost-effective, enterprise-ready web content management system rolled into their corporate portal. This allows companies to cut their total cost of ownership down to supporting one technology for both their portal and their web content management. That fact alone should excite small- to medium-size businesses that maintain a web presence.

Features

The "Enterprise Content Management" (ECM) functional area can be summed up with the following feature list:

• Authoring

• Workflow

• Web publishing

• Document management

• Records management

• Policies

• Multiple languages

Authoring

The content authoring features of ECM allow users to create rich content for their corporate web site using a web browser. This has been a feature in web content management solutions since their inception, but it has been limited in SharePoint until now.

The "what you see is what you get" (or WYSIWYG) web content editor truly empowers users to create very compelling content without leaving their browsers (Figure 1-24). The SharePoint user interface has also been extended with additional commands and status indicators for in-context web page authoring.

The page layouts function is another feature that allows users to quickly and easily author and publish content. The defined structures guide authors ...