Web Content Management Breakdown

September, 2007

The nebulous term “Web Content Management” can be broken down into two parts: Content Maintenance and Content Publishing. Content Maintenance is the addition, deletion, and editing of the actual content on your web site. Content Publishing is the process of running a publishing job from an internal staging environment to either an internally or externally facing production environment.

Content Maintenance

Information on a site can be pure HTML code displayed in a content editor web part, images displayed in a image web part, or even items stored in a SharePoint list. By using the content editor web part, users have the option of using two interfaces: One is a Rich Text Box Editor interface that allows users to create tables, resize fonts, change font styles (bold, italic, etc.), add bulleted lists, and much more; the second interface is an HTML editor. A user can design an HTML page using all of the standard HTML tags in a separate designer, formalize the look and feel, then copy and paste the HTML code into the content editor web part. The content editor web part also allows users, with the proper permissions of course, to edit content in the web part . This web part is a very powerful tool for designing SharePoint sites that don’t “look like SharePoint”.

Content Publishing

Most organizations have a staging area where all of the content editing occurs and is approved. MOSS 2007 makes it very easy to publish that content from a “staging” area within your SharePoint farm to a “production” area. The content publishing happens via paths and jobs. Both paths and jobs are created and managed via the Central Administration site. A path lists the source site (the staging area), identifies the central administration location and login, and lists the destination site (the production area). Once a path has been successfully created, the administrator can create a scheduled job to run for that specific path, then push content out from the staging site to the destination site according to schedule.

Web Content Management Utilization

The web content management features are some of the more compelling and exciting ones in MOSS 2007. The Content Maintenance components allow subject matter experts, or content owners, to easily manage the information on their public sites. Meanwhile, the Content Publishing components and dual staging/production web sites allow for a review and approval of information before it is made publicly available. The combination of these two features makes MOSS 2007 an innovative platform on which to build an external web site.