Chapter 23. Managing Non-SharePoint Sites

IN THIS CHAPTER

Importing and exporting Web sites

Publishing Web sites

Using administration features

After you develop your Web site project and it's ready for deployment, you most likely need to move it to a Web server that can host the Web site and where it's accessible to its audience. Unless you're remotely authoring directly on a Web site, this task usually involves making a copy of the Web content into the allocated space on the Web server. SharePoint Designer allows for a couple of simple and flexible mechanisms for moving content from one location to another. You can either choose to import and export content or publish Web sites.

Publishing in SharePoint Designer is the process of moving Web site content in a supportable manner from a Web content location to another. You can choose to publish to a remote location or reverse-publish from a remote location to your local computer. Besides publishing, importing, and exporting content from one location to another, SharePoint Designer also provides a Web site packing feature that allows you to package Web sites or portions of Web sites into Web packages that can be unpackaged later at a destination Web content location.

This chapter discusses the various site publishing and management capabilities of SharePoint Designer as applied to non-SharePoint sites. The concept of SharePoint Designer Web publishing doesn't really apply to SharePoint sites, as these sites are authored directly by connecting to the remote SharePoint sites. I talk about how you can import and export Web sites by using Personal Web Packages and publish Web sites by choosing a remote authoring mechanism, such as FTP, WebDAV, FPSE, etc. While you should already be familiar with many of the administrative features of SharePoint Designer to some extent by now, later sections of this chapter take you through the user interface that SharePoint Designer offers for administering non-SharePoint Web sites. To begin with, I discuss the Web site import and export features of SharePoint Designer. After you open your Web site in SharePoint Designer, you can choose to import files and folders or use the Import Web Site Wizard to retrieve files from a file location, a remote Web site, or just an HTTP site on the Internet.

SharePoint Designer's import, export, and publishing features are available through access points in the File menu. You should note that while some of the import and export features in these menus apply to SharePoint sites, the publishing features of SharePoint Designer apply solely to non-SharePoint Web sites.