MOSS 2007 as Web Content Management for Internet-Facing Web Sites - Tech Ed EMEA 2008 Developers

alistairl — Wed, 03 Dec 2008 10:53:00 GMT

In my day I have had a fair bit to do with Internet-Facing Web Sites and the challenges of drop dead deadlines and culture clashes that these kinds of projects tend to bring. Anyway, enough of me, this session appealed to me as a catch up on the world of content management as Microsoft sees it. PDC 2003 was notable to me for its complete lack of mention of Content Management Server and this was borne out in the following months when it was announced that MSCMS was to become part of Microsoft Office SharePoint Server.

At the time this was a bit of an annoyance, out in the web world we were interested about standards compliance and cross browser support. On top of straightforward W3C markup compliance was accessibility which at the time was a bit of a challenge even for plain old asp.net, let alone an Intranet tool like SharePoint. But since then Microsoft Office SharePoint Server has been through a big release and a whole lot of experience has been gained by implementing the product in a number of different configurations. This session at TechEd aimed to make sure that everyone was up to date with the web content management capabilities of the current product.

First of all we had a quick introduction to our presenter, needless to say Andrew Connell knows a thing or two about MOSS, is an MVP for Office SharePoint Server and has a book out on SharePoint Publishing. We were going to cover the broad gamut of web publishing on topics such as Web Content Management, Page Layouts, Branding Publishing Sites, the Content Query Web Part and Forms Based authentication. Then a "watch this space" announcement about a really good sample site. By the end of the year we would have a site that would be a good demonstration of the web capabilities of MOSS 2007 - and it would not use the BlueBand master - at least we hope not. The sample site will be for the familiar fictional AdventureWorks company, I look forward to it becoming available.

So how did we get here, well a few years back Microsoft decided to consolidate their Electronic Content Management strategies and centred these around MOSS 2007. This is when document, web and other materials produced off the back of collaboration and work came together under the Office banner and we immediately had to widen our heads to take it all in. But focusing on our particular area of interest, the Web Content Management (WCM) facilities in MOSS 2007 are the successor to those in MCMS 2002. And a bit like MCMS, you aren't restricted to using WCM on public websites, you are welcome to use them internally too.

We then got in to the nitty gritty of what Publishing sites look like from the inside. They follow the standard site collection / site shape of the SharePoint way of doing things and pages are held in a Library. This does hit one issue with site owners wanting to rearrange their URL into something "nicer" but we were warned off http rewriting with some neat regex. Do the performance metrics on this approach and you will see how much processor utilisation it takes. Andrew recommended pushing the URL issue off to your ISA / Firewall box instead which will handle this a whole lot better and make sure your application box is concentrating on serving web pages.

Then on to a bit of presentation fun with the "ABCs" of WCM and SharePoint. In our case we would be looking at Authoring (web based of course) Branding (developer and designers working together) and Controlled Publishing (Consistent business rules for approval).

Web based authoring used to be quite revolutionary in the old days when Microsoft didn't even own what came to be MCMS, but these days we even have a choice of companies that will host a blog and not ask us to install one piece of software or install a plug in to our web browser. But to cut a long story short, you can use your browser to author content for a SharePoint publishing site.

Branding is a very very important issue when it comes to considering Microsoft for WCM. I'll hold on my final judgement as to whether AdventureWorks will be the sample site to move things on, but MOSS has a similar problem to that of MCMS in that you cannot and should not use what comes out of the box to evaluate its capability for WCM and similarly you should not let that anywhere near a public website. Yes, you can perhaps "get away" with it on an Extranet, but even with that you should really speak to your marketing and account management team first. But face it, if you are on a project that can fund a MOSS infrastructure then it should also be a project that has decent representation from brand owners. The "good" news is that MOSS 2007 is based on the principles you have learned for ASP 2.0, so all that hard work learning how to lay things out using CSS and master pages is well learned, but there are also differences. You have a huge amount of CSS that comes with MOSS, and a whole load of content placeholders to know all about too.

Andrew was good enough to explain what he was meaning by certain terms, which was a good presenting point. Although I would reckon that everyone in the audience would be able to create html markup and deploy it to a web server of any flavour, I think that less would have experience of a large website deployment. When you have to deal with a project team with Internet security people all the way through to graphic designers and copywriters then it is important that you as a developer can bring together the separate elements of brand and content while keeping in mind the WCM and infrastructure requirements. Branding is the so-called chrome or design, whereas content is is text and images that vary quite often.With an eye to infrastructure we want to make sure that the approach we take will work across load balanced web servers, and can be deployed in a repeatable fashion without developer input. Branding should be able to accommodate changing content without developer input, which is really the spirit of MOSS web publishing.

How to implement branding and content management in MOSS is a choice based on a number of factors, including the skill set of your team and how you approach disaster recovery. Some approaches may be simple in plain IIS, but they mean that deployment is a two part process of MOSS and your separate items. Others are easy to do on one box, but a pain to move, such as some of the techniques using SharePoint designer. Above all, make sure you consider the maintenance factors when choosing an approach.

Then for a bit of light relief, Andrew demonstrated the new Adventureworks demonstration site and how it illustrated that you can implement a site that "Doesn't look like SharePoint". From what we have been told it has been implemented as a proper reference site (but looks good too) so we should be allowed to take some principles from the implementation such as using Field Controls for versioned content, but Web Parts for functionality. I'm really looking forward to getting hold of it and pulling it apart to see what is inside.

Key Facts:

Session Code: OFC202

Speakers: Andrew Connell

Track: Office and SharePoint

Rating: 9/10

Attendance: 300 is (90% capacity)

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Alistair Laing's Blog : WCM, TechEd EMEA 2008

MOSS 2007 as Web Content Management for Internet-Facing Web Sites - Tech Ed EMEA 2008 Developers

Key Facts: