Web Content Management is now part of Microsoft Sharepoint Server (Office 12 System). MCMS is dead. Ryan Stocker from Microsoft in WCM session highlighted the new features of upcoming WCM product.
  • Today there are two portal stories from Microsoft – Sharepoint is for Intranet and MCMS was for Internet. With Office 12, it will be an integrated story. You can create Internet Facing Sites and Intranet (as always) using Sharepoint technologies. Remove forced choice “CMS02” vs Sharepoint Portal Server. Roadmap towards an integrated Enterprise Content Management (ECM) story.
  • To achieve the last point all WCM services found in MCMS02 have been developed into the new Sharepoint server. This meant adding Internet readiness to Office “12” Servers.
  • New WCM features introduced
    ○ Consistent and Pixel Perfect Branding – which was extremely difficult today with Sharepoint
    ○ Page Authoring – Web based or Smart Client (Word)
    ○ Dynamic Site Navigation controls/webparts
    ○ Governance – Publishing Schedules, Approval workflow, Formatting restrictions
    ○ Site Management Tools
    ○ Performance – Internet Scale & powerful Caching to handle high traffic rather going to DB for every piece of content. Also cache buckets are based on user rights.
    ○ Content Deployment methods
    ○ Security – Forms Authentication, Anonymous
    ○ Multi-Lingual Sites (Basic site in English and then other sites depend on this)
    ○ Search
  • Customers will be provided powerful tools to migrate all content from existing MCMS02 sites to Office “12” server. 
    • Make creation of dynamic, produced websites dramatically faster and easier. 
    • Provide great Out Of Box (OOB) Experience
    • Lower amount of costly custom code
    • Incremental migration is like a job that can move incremental content from CMS02 every night to the new site
  • In the new system:
    • Portals are a collection of webs
    • The webs are arranged in a hierarchy
    • Hierarchy controls navigation and security
    • SPSv2 Area, CMS02 Channel are now all based on the WSS webs construct for containership
    • Each web has a document library for pages. Pages are special document library items. So they inherit all WSS functions like versioning, Check-in/Check-out, workflow free
    • Each web can have its own ASP.NET v2.0 master page. Then there is page layout that actually lays out the page
    • WSS ships with standard field controls. There are additional CMS field controls like rich HTML
    • Portal Navigation 
      • Includes Webs, Pages and Authored links
      • Dynamic Navigation based on site hierarchy
      • Navigation links trimmed based on security, workflow state and publishing schedule
    • Security
      • A new WSS authentication provider implemented on top ASP.NET Role provider
        • Viewer role: Viewers can use the site, can view pages, documents, images. But they can’t use the Sharepoint application – Can’t call Remote APIs: SOAP, DAV & RPC. Can’t view application UI
        • Policy: Can constrain maximum access per web application. Deny all write access via http://site:80
    • Topology
      • Farms: Scale up and down as needed
      • Multi-farm: Staging environments in different networks. Authoring in Intranet with AD Authentication. Production in live networks with forms authentication
      • Site collections can be deployed between environments
    • Paths and Job
      • QuickDeploy job role allows news authors to deploy content immediately
      • Normally there is path which is channel connecting authoring to the live environment
      • Jobs control what content is copied when
      • It doesn’t deploy security setting
Having worked on Portal Development for nearly a decade, I was quite skeptical when I heard Ryan talk about using Sharepoint as the basis for a High Traffic Internet site. So I went to Hands-On-Labs (HOL) and played around with this new technology. After an hour of getting my hands dirty I was convinced that this is very promising piece of work. Though the final release and performance will determine its success, the idea of using Sharepoint’s (ASP.NET v2.0) evolved WebPart technology as the basis, brings in hitherto unseen power to the WCM space.
You can download from here slides for this and other Sharepoint sessions of PDC ’05. Thanks to Mark Harrison for the link to this page.

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