Chapter 13. Building Web Content Management Solutions

By John Holliday

Web content management (WCM) encompasses a range of activities having to do with publishing information for consumption through a web interface. Its primary goal is to enable content contributors to collaborate and publish information from a variety of sources in a controlled and consistent manner.

Often, the skills required to maintain branding and consistency do not match the skills needed to produce up-to-date content. The challenge is to empower knowledge workers to keep content up to date without requiring them to understand HTML or user interface design, which is more suited to graphic designers and web developers. At the same time, there is also a need to empower web development teams to manipulate site structure and manage evolving design requirements without having to work directly with content providers.

Web content management solves this problem. Using a WCM system, knowledge workers can edit and publish web pages without having to work directly with web designers, because their submissions are controlled, formatted, and routed automatically by the system. Web designers are free to set up page layouts and styles independently of content authors and vice versa. WCM also provides enhanced collaboration support, allowing content to be moderated and approved before it is made available for public consumption.

Microsoft Office SharePoint Server (MOSS) 2007 includes a robust set of features that provide a complete WCM system built from standard SharePoint components. The following sections describe these features and demonstrate tools and techniques for leveraging them to create custom content-authoring and -publishing applications.