Chapter 21

Configuring and Managing Web Content Management and Internet Sites

WHAT’S IN THIS CHAPTER?

• What’s new with WCM?
• Architecting Internet sites
• Configuring and creating WCM Internet sites
• Cross-site publishing
• Authoring content improvements

SharePoint 2013 delivers the biggest leap forward in web content management (WCM) functionality in the history of the product. Although SharePoint 2007 was a major development with its introduction of true WCM capabilities, SharePoint 2013 web content management has ironed out any remaining wrinkles. For example, you can say goodbye to the /pages directory showing up in the URL, and to the single site-collection constraints that have hindered developers in the past. You can say welcome to friendly URLs, cross-site content publishing, and adaptive experiences. The new release of SharePoint delivers new capabilities and features in the WCM space for everyone: web designers, developers, content authors, and, of course, SharePoint administrators. These major new enhancements to WCM capabilities enable an organization to leverage its SharePoint expertise to build web content publishing solutions for either internal sites or public, Internet-facing sites.

This chapter begins with a brief overview of what’s new with WCM in SharePoint 2013. Then it digs deeper from an administrative point of view and looks at architecting Internet sites, deployment considerations, building out a WCM Internet-facing solution, and monitoring your Internet-facing site after it has launched. Keep in mind that an entire book would be necessary to cover WCM and Internet site creation in complete detail, so this chapter focuses on the most significant new SharePoint 2013 capabilities affecting administrators.

WHAT’S NEW WITH WCM?

If you are new to web content management (WCM), think of it as a set of features and functionality in SharePoint 2013 that organizations can use to build, manage, publish, and monitor site collections, sites, and web pages. For those with SharePoint experience, this section provides a quick overview of each of the many new capabilities that affect the management and configuration of the SharePoint farm. While not all the new features specifically apply to SharePoint administrators, it is important that administrators understand the new functionality at a high level. This overview also introduces a lot of new terminology that is used throughout the chapter.

Cross-Site Publishing

At the heart of the new web content management features in SharePoint 2013 is cross-site publishing. You might see this functionality described in a number of different ways, including adaptive experience, content by search, dynamic publishing, or search-driven publishing. Regardless of the terminology, cross-site publishing is incredibly powerful, removing barriers and opening up several new possibilities for publishing content. This new publishing capability relies on the new search architecture in SharePoint 2013, which is discussed in Chapter 13, “Configuring and Managing Enterprise Search.” Cross-site publishing enables an organization to author content in one or more site collections and then dynamically expose that content through search to other publishing site collections, each potentially with unique branding and a mix of content from authoring sites and the current site collection. When the content in an authoring site is changed, the publishing site collections are automatically updated. You will take a deeper look at cross-site publishing in the Configuring Cross-Site Publishing section later in this chapter.

Catalogs and Category Pages

The catalog is a new capability in SharePoint 2013 that, when used together with cross-site publishing, enables easy access to content in other site collections across the farm. You enable this capability by designating any library or list within a site collection as a catalog, and then this content can be easily reused by any publishing site collections. This new feature removes the content publishing barriers across site collections or farms that have been a challenge with past versions of SharePoint. Catalog data can be displayed using category pages, which are new forms of page layouts for displaying content from a product catalog or list catalog.

Just as page layouts provide a structured way to organize and display content, category pages provide a very powerful way to aggregate and display content that requires a specific format. Site designers can manage the overall page design, such as text formatting and images, and then each product or category can use this same design and same page for product display. For example, most organizations issue numerous announcements that they want to publish in a consistent way. Category pages provide a structure to ensure that all the announcements are displayed in the same way, versus creating individual pages for each announcement. For a more comprehensive discussion on ways to implement and control how content is presented, the reader is referred to Chapter 12, “Branding SharePoint.”

Managed Navigation

SharePoint 2010 introduced managed metadata and term sets. SharePoint 2013 introduces managed navigation, which allows the administrator to configure and manage site navigation using term sets. Site collection administrators can use the traditional navigation based on website structure or the new managed navigation. Managed navigation is created by adding terms to term sets in the Term Store Management tool. Managed navigation and category pages are often used together, as you can associate a category page with a specific term in a term set used for managed navigation. This means that you can create more user-friendly and more contextually relevant URLs using managed navigation and category pages, rather than URLs that are based on complex site structure and numerous characters that have little to no meaning to end users.

Content Search

You read earlier that search drives the new cross-site publishing model for building WCM sites. Several new features and capabilities make this possible:

• Content Search Web Part — Central to the new search-driven site model is the new Content Search Web Part. Administrators specify a query value for this Web Part. There is a new Query Builder tool that allows the administrator to visually create their query, as opposed to learning complex syntax. For example, you could create a query to display all the web sites the user has access to, or display all the tasks assigned to a user. When users browse to the page that contains the Content Search Web Part, the query is automatically executed and the results from the search query are displayed. When used with capabilities such as managed navigation and category pages, this Web Part becomes very powerful.
• Item details pages — Item details pages are similar in nature to category pages. They retrieve search content, finding a single item in the catalog, and display it following a predefined format. One page can be used for multiple items and URLs.
• Friendly URLs — When category pages are used in conjunction with managed navigation, you can build a friendly URL to content by designating a particular value or term from the term set to use with the navigation. Category pages and item details pages can automatically display this content.
• Refiners and faceted navigation — These features enable site designers to build category pages that provide site users with a way to reduce the number of search results based on a particular value. Refiners are based on managed properties and can be included on a page via the Refinement Panel Web Part. Faceted navigation enables site designers to use different refiners for each term in a term set if desired.
• Query Rules — Search result sets are processed through query rules in SharePoint 2013. Query Rules are managed at the site collection level, and enable site designers to specify conditions, actions, and publishing values. Query Rules can also be used to fine-tune the ranking or promote specific results based on defined business results. For example, you could create a Query Rule that promotes all of the results that contain an Excel spreadsheet.
• Analytics Processing — SharePoint 2013 includes a new analytics processing component that looks at search index content and bubbles up content that seems more relevant to site users. This information is surfaced through the Recommended Items Web Part or the Popular Items Web Part. Including this type of information on the page helps to point users in the right direction based on what other previous users found helpful or interesting.

Internet Site Improvements

Before digging deeper into what makes a public Internet site unique, it is worth mentioning several improvements to the web content management capabilities that are targeted at public-facing Internet sites.

SEO Site Maps and Improvements

SharePoint 2013 provides several search engine optimization (SEO) improvements over the previous versions. SEO includes a number of different approaches that are designed to improve your sites visibility to potential visitors. For example, SharePoint no longer has 302 redirects, something that has made SEO difficult in the past. Friendly URLs also help with SEO significantly, as well as country code top-level domains (enabled via cross-site publishing). SEO properties such as meta HTML tag description and keywords are now built in to the managed navigation; and SharePoint 2013 can be configured to auto-generate an XML sitemap and register with robots.txt greatly enhances SharePoint’s ability to play nice with Internet search engines such as Bing or Google. Finally, SharePoint 2013 comes with webmaster tools integration that help site administrators register their site with Internet search companies and go through the owner verification process.

Custom Error Pages

Another new feature in SharePoint 2013 is the capability to include custom error pages in publishing sites. In cases where 404 errors occur, users are now redirected to a custom error page in the site collection. This page is created by default in the publishing site Pages Library (PageNotFoundError.aspx) and can be set via the PageNotFoundURL property at the site collection level. For Internet websites, this important capability provides users with the best possible navigation experience, even when something doesn’t go as planned.

Performance Improvements

The HTML markup has been redesigned from the ground up to keep it as simple and clean as possible. This enhancement supports the overall minimal download strategy, making every effort to minimize bits on the wire. Another major aspect of the performance improvements is the Distributed Cache service. Based on Windows Server AppFabric, the Distributed Cache service manages caching throughout the farm. This includes managing the Content Search Web Part cache, which is an important part of search-driven publishing sites. Finally, image renditions and channels are brand-new capabilities that can significantly reduce the amount of data sent over the wire. You’ll learn more about image renditions and channels later in this section.

Variations and Translation Services

Variations is a SharePoint feature that provides a structure for copying content from a source site to one or more target sites based on specific settings and scenarios. The Variations feature was first introduced in SharePoint 2007, but several new enhancements to Variations and translation are included in SharePoint 2013. The Variations feature set is now targeted solely at creating multi-language sites. Users who visit a site where Variations are in use will be redirected to the correct variations site based on their browser language settings. Variations has also been improved with an integrated translation service. Content authors can either make their content available for third-party human translation via a standard XLIFF file format or send content off for machine translation. In addition, variations plays nicely with cross-site publishing scenarios as well. Variations also includes several administrative enhancements and reliability improvements, including improved logging data, the capability to export logs to Excel, and bulk page export capabilities.

Design Manager

Master pages provide the capability to deliver the specific navigation and look and feel to the website. Web designers typically are not familiar with creating custom master pages, and therefore have struggled to convert their website design into a usable master page. Design Manager is a new capability that enables web designers to create a design package using their editor of choice, upload it into SharePoint, and have a master page created for them. This is a powerful capability, converting what used to be an extremely laborious and technical process into a fully automated end-to-end tool that caters to web designers. Any web designer is now a SharePoint branding guru as well. For a more comprehensive discussion of Design Manager and the branding process, refer to Chapter 12, “Branding SharePoint.”

Snippet Gallery

The Snippet Gallery is actually part of the Design Manager but it plays such an important role that it is worth calling it out separately. This gallery contains SharePoint components such as controls and Web Parts that designers can quickly add to their pages. In the past, web designers didn’t have the knowledge or patience necessary to incorporate these elements into the page design. Typically, a developer was required to make these types of changes.

The gallery provides an easy way to select a component, configure its properties, copy the generated HTML, and then add it to the design. For example, web designers can add to their design the SharePoint-specific page elements from the snippet gallery such as the top global navigation or a search box, or the main placeholder control. In addition, designers can continue to use their preferred HTML editor to update their design.

Device Channels

Device Channels are also a part of the Design Manager that warrant separate discussion because of their importance. Device Channels enable SharePoint sites to be targeted to a particular device in a whole new way. Through the Design Manager, administrators or designers can define different device channels for each device or browser they wish to target. Device Channels can be ranked so that certain channels take precedence over others. This way, if a particular browser matches two different channels, the rankings can be used to determine which channel to apply.

With each channel, designers can specify a different master page and CSS. Page layouts are used with all Device Channels, but within the page layout, designers can leverage the new Device Channel Panel control to designate page layout content that is unique for a particular channel. For example, the control can be used on a page layout when a designer wishes to remove a column of content for smartphone rendering.

Channels and device channels give designers much better control over the user experience for each targeted mobile platform, making SharePoint 2013 a much more mobile-friendly experience than previously. Chapter 12 also takes a deeper look at Device Channels and how they can be used to enhance a site’s user experience across a variety of devices.

Content Authoring Improvements

The authoring experience in SharePoint is also extremely important. Several improvements to SharePoint 2013 will be welcomed by content authors and contributors:

• Text editor improvements — Clean copy from Microsoft Word, whereby formatting is kept but all the extra Microsoft Word HTML is removed. Authors are presented with options for pasting content based on their individual needs.
• Iframe support — Using a built-in method, authors are able to easily and quickly embed iframe code. From an administrative perspective, this can be enabled, disabled, or enabled for specific sites via a new HTML Field Security setting.
• Navigation configuration — Global and current navigation are also much easier to configure and utilize. Links to add new menu items are available in edit mode, while authors and designers can now drag and drop these items to set a desired order in cases where such navigation is required.
• Image renditions — Image renditions enable authors to upload one image and then display different versions or renditions of this image within the site based on a specified size, width, or crop. When you create a rendition you specify the dimensions, and then every image that uses that rendition will adhere to the specified size. Image renditions are especially valuable for mobile device performance or when bandwidth is a premium, because you can have one very large image in the site and then use renditions to display smaller versions of the image throughout the site.
• Video enhancements — There is a new built-in video content type. The video upload process is improved for authors, and video thumbnail previews are automatically generated. Playing video uses HTML5 by default whenever possible, reverting to Silverlight if the browser doesn’t support HTML5. Also introduced is a new concept known as video sets, whereby authors can upload multiple videos with different bandwidth renditions, and SharePoint will pick the lowest resolution set to display by default.

As you can see, there are numerous exciting additions to the WCM feature set in SharePoint 2013. With these features in mind, the following sections look at how they can be used to build and deploy an Internet website using SharePoint 2013. Keep in mind that all of these features (and the discussion about them) apply to building an intranet website as well.

ARCHITECTING INTERNET SITES

Clearly, there are a lot of exciting new WCM capabilities in SharePoint 2013. The administrator must be able to combine all of these great new features to architect and implement a public-facing Internet website that meets business requirements.

The rest of the chapter dives deeper into how to meet this challenge. It focuses on key considerations in architecting and implementing Internet publishing sites, but a lot of the content applies to internal sites as well, such as an intranet portal for an organization.

What Is SharePoint for Internet Sites?

At this point, it would be useful to examine the key factors that distinguish SharePoint Internet sites from other sites. How should administrators view an Internet-facing SharePoint environment versus the typical internal-facing SharePoint environment? Table 21.1 below highlights a few of the differences between an Internet website and an internal site.

TABLE 21-1: Internal versus Internet SharePoint Sites

These differences affect how the site is architected, the functionality, and the overall configuration and management. Because the Internet site content is public, and the web page content changes much more frequently, tighter controls are typically in place for authoring, reviewing, and publishing of content, as well as the navigation of the site. Because SharePoint WCM is all about the authoring, publishing, and managing of content, this chapter focuses on the Internet website and the use of WCM for those sites; but content publishing can be equally important to an intranet site or an extranet site, so the discussion also pertains to any site for which this capability is important.

Preparing the Farm for WCM

Typically, the purpose of Internet sites is to publish articles and content, or to promote products and services to prospective customers, partners, investors, or potential employees. Before discussing how to create sites and configure the WCM capability, this section looks at the key services and functionality required to support WCM and Internet sites. This can be referred to as preparing the farm for WCM.

A few core platform improvements in SharePoint 2013 significantly impact the function and performance of Internet websites. These include search and the new Distributed Cache service. As discussed in Chapter 13, “Configuring and Managing Enterprise Search,” SharePoint 2013 now combines the best of SharePoint 2010’s search capability and the best of the separate search product FAST Search for SharePoint 2010 into a single search platform. No longer available as a separate product, FAST Search is now fully integrated and provides the core functionality of SharePoint 2013 search. This significant change has paved the way for search-driven websites and capabilities that play critical roles in WCM.

The Distributed Cache service is a new service for SharePoint 2013. It provides farm-level caching capability for a number of features, including page load performance and security trimming of content. Because SharePoint’s social features, such as microblogging and newsfeeds, rely heavily on this cache, it is covered in more detail in Chapter 14; but pertinent to our discussion, the Distributed Cache service manages the Content Search Web Part cache, which is a key part of the search-driven publishing sites infrastructure. We’ll revisit this service later in the chapter in more detail as part of the discussion about the new publishing model and search-driven content.

Other platform-level improvements in SharePoint 2013 include the Machine Translation Service. This new service application is responsible for automatic translation of content in cases where you want to localize your Internet website and rely on the automated translation. The Machine Translation Service connects to the Microsoft Translator online service via SSL.

Over the course of the chapter, you’ll set up a SharePoint publishing site and create new content using many of the new features just described in order to familiarize yourself with all of SharePoint’s WCM capability. As part of preparing the farm for WCM, you will learn which services are critical, and then verify their existence and configuration.

Distributed Cache Service

You need to verify that the Distributed Cache service is installed and running on your farm. This service is configured and started automatically on every web front end and application server when the configuration wizard is executed to join the server to the farm. Administrators can manage this service or offload the functionality to a single server (also called a host) or to a set of dedicated servers referred to as a cache cluster. For this exercise, you’ll simply verify that the service has been started. Keep in mind that the following steps apply to a Distributed Cache host that is not part of a cache cluster. If you have implemented a cluster, then refer to Chapter 14 for guidance or see the reference at http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/jj219613.aspx.

1. Open Central Administration.

2. Under System Settings, click Manage Services on Server. If you have several servers in your farm, note the server drop-down section in the top right of the list. Be sure to select a server that is either a web front end or an application server.

3. In the list of services, verify that the Distributed Cache service is “Started” by reviewing the value in the Status column, as shown in Figure 21-1.

FIGURE 21-1

4. If the service is stopped, click Start in the Action column to start it.

Search Service Application

The details about creating and configuring the Search Service Application are covered in Chapter 13. The following discussion ensures that the minimum search configuration has been completed to enable cross-site publishing functionality, and to enable you to update your settings if necessary. Use the following steps to verify that the service application is started, that all web applications are being crawled, and that a crawl configuration has been completed.

1. Open Central Administration. Under Application Management, click Manage service applications and verify that the Search Service Application has been created and is started. If it has not been created or has not been started, refer to Chapter 13 for details on performing this configuration.

2. Click the Search Service Application name, which will take you to the Search Service Application: Search Administration web page, shown in Figure 21-2.

FIGURE 21-2

3. On the left, under the Crawling heading, click Content Sources. You want to confirm that SharePoint content is being crawled regularly.

4. By default, you should see a Local SharePoint site’s content source listed on the Manage Content Sources page. Click the drop-down arrow and select Edit.

5. On the Edit Content Source page, ensure that the URLs for all your web applications are listed in the Start Addresses section. If not, add the missing URLs.

6. Under Crawl Schedules, ensure that Enable Continuous Crawls is selected or a crawl schedule has been created if Enable Incremental Crawls has been chosen. Now is also the time to update the incremental crawl schedule if necessary.

7. Click OK if you made any changes.

There are several other configuration options and settings in the Search Service Application, but for now it is sufficient to confirm that the SharePoint content is being crawled regularly, as it ensures that search-driven sites work as expected.

Creating and Configuring the Machine Translation Service Application

The Machine Translation Service provides the capability to automatically translate documents. This application will likely not have been created and configured, so this section will spend a little more time on it, rather than just verification. This exercise guides you through the process of creating a new Machine Translation Service application if one isn’t already created, and applying the necessary settings. Before you begin, you must ensure the following:

• The App Management service application must be configured and started (discussed in Chapter 11).
• Server-to-server authentication and app authentication must be configured (discussed in Chapter 11).
• A User Profile service application must be created and configured (discussed in Chapter 14).
• Internet access must be available from the server providing the machine translations.

1. Using the Manage Service Applications page in Central Administration, verify that the Machine Translation Service application has been created and is started. You may want to review the settings on the Machine Translation Service page by clicking the service application name to ensure the settings are appropriate for your requirements.

2. If the service application does not exist, click the New button in the Ribbon and select Machine Translation Service. The Create New Machine Translation Service dialog will appear (see Figure 21-3). Give the new service application a name, and choose an existing application pool or create a new one. Keep in mind that the account used by the application pool must have Full Control permissions on the User Profile service application.

FIGURE 21-3

3. Select the “Add this service application’s proxy to the farm’s default proxy list” check box, unless you have multiple web applications that will be using different translation services.

4. In the Database section, enter the appropriate information based on your company’s naming conventions and security protocol.

5. Leave the Partitioned Mode option disabled. This option configures the application for multi-tenancy. You would choose Run in partitioned mode if you were hosting translation services for multiple tenants. For the purposes of this chapter, you can leave this option disabled.

6. Click OK to save your configuration and create the service application.

7. Once the new service application has been created, click the service application name to bring up the configuration settings page. Review each of the configuration settings but don’t make any changes for now. Of particular interest are the Enabled File Extensions options shown in Figure 21-4. Also available are Item Size Limits, Proxy Settings, Throughput, Translation Attempts, and Online Translation Connection settings.

FIGURE 21-4

8. Leave the default configuration as is and click OK. You will validate the configuration settings in a later exercise.

Creating a Publishing Site Collection

Now that the key services and service applications are confirmed to be operational, you’ll create a publishing site collection using the Publishing Portal site template. This has several important site collection WCM publishing features activated by default. The publishing features can also be enabled manually for any nonpublishing site. Keep in mind that a site collection that has the publishing features enabled is critical to implementing the WCM capability.

1. Open Central Administration. Under Application Management, click Create site collections.

2. On the Create Site Collection page, note the Web Application selector at the top of the page. Be sure to select the correct web application because this is where the new site collection will be hosted.

3. Fill in the fields for Title, Description, and Web Site Address (the URL of the site collection).

4. For Template Selection, click the Publishing tab and then select Publishing Portal. An example of this page and the template options is shown in Figure 21-5. Note that there are three different publishing site collection templates: Publishing Portal, Enterprise Wiki, and Product Catalog. Review the descriptions for each of the templates. You will use the Product Catalog template later in the chapter.

FIGURE 21-5

5. Enter the name of a Primary Site Collection Administrator and a Secondary Administrator. You could select a Quota Template if you wish, but it is not relevant for this exercise.

6. Click OK. After a few seconds the new site collection will be created and you are presented with a link to open it in a new browser window.

Figure 21-6 shows the newly created Publishing Portal site collection. You can see that many of the important features associated with creating a publishing portal have been provided, separated into categories pertinent to the designer and architect.

FIGURE 21-6

Planning and Configuring WCM Capability

As you begin to architect your Internet sites, you need to consider several different topics to ensure that you create a successful solution. These topics are summarized in the following list and then discussed in more detail in the following sections:

• SharePoint architecture and site hierarchy
• Variations and multilingual support
• Publishing methods and site content

This broad overview includes planning, so some of the following material is theoretical, but you will also walk through some necessary configuration steps as well. Rather than provide an in-depth planning review, this combination of discussion and action gives you hands-on experience with key topics and issues pertaining to WCM and Internet sites.

SharePoint Architecture

You need to determine how many different public-facing websites you require. These different sites may represent different geographic regions of your company or different products. In addition, you need to determine what types of sites to provision and your site hierarchy. Just like SharePoint 2010, SharePoint 2013 websites exist in a site collection, so you need to know whether your different Internet sites will be provisioned as site collections or sites contained in a site collection (also known as subsites). Conceptually, this is referred to as the site hierarchy.

Site Hierarchy

The site hierarchy in SharePoint 2010 still exists in SharePoint 2013 and can be used just as it was in previous versions. This hierarchy includes the following logical architecture components:

• Server farm
• Service applications
• Web applications
• Site collections
• Sites
• Lists and libraries
• Items

There are additional logical architecture components such as zones, web application policies, and content databases, but the preceding list serves as a simplified outline. Because of its similarity to the SharePoint 2010 logical hierarchy, you can follow a similar process to plan and administer your environment in SharePoint 2013. However, because SharePoint 2013 introduces a number of new features, such as cross-site publishing, you need to consider how these new features impact your architecture. Another such feature important to Internet sites is caching, which is discussed in the next section.

Caching

SharePoint 2013 includes both old and new caching capabilities. The new Distributed Cache service was discussed earlier. This service supports the social features in SharePoint 2013, as well as Content Search Web Part caching. Because search plays such a prominent role in cross-site publishing, this caching service is important. The service is on by default, but you can configure and modify it to maximize performance. Refer to Chapter 14 for more information about configuring the Distributed Cache service.

Several other caching methods still available from previous SharePoint versions need to be a part of solutions in SharePoint 2013. The different caching options are summarized here:

• ASP.NET output cache — Also known as the page output cache, this caches frequently accessed compiled pages in web front-end memory. Multiple device channels means more memory is required to cache this content now.
• BLOB caching — This is also known as disk-based caching. Frequently accessed BLOB content such as images is stored in this cache. The introduction of image renditions ensures that the BLOB cache is better utilized.
• Object cache — The object cache reduces the amount of chatter between the SharePoint servers and SQL servers by caching frequently accessed content such as tables or lists on the web front ends.

Because BLOB and object caching play critical roles, the following exercise demonstrates how to ensure that they are properly configured.

The following steps configure object and BLOB cache settings on your publishing portal web application:

Variations and Multilingual Sites

You should consider whether your site needs require providing content in more than one language, or to more than one locale. Even if your initial assessment suggests you only have to support a single language, you should strongly consider supporting multiple languages in case this may be necessary in the future. The reason is that multilingual support affects your site structure, and it is much simpler to design this into your solution up front than to add it later. It also saves time and resources later if language requirements change because SharePoint 2013 uses variations to provide multilingual support, and adding variations can impact site URLs, resulting in more work.

Whereas Variations in SharePoint 2010 could be used to target different groups based on various criteria, SharePoint 2013 uses Variations only for providing multilingual support. Earlier in the chapter, the “What’s New with WCM” section briefly described improvements to the variations feature in SharePoint 2013. Using Variations, you can copy content from a source site or variation to one or more target Variations sites, providing a multilingual content targeting capability. Users who browse to a site where Variations is in use will be redirected to the correct Variations site based on their browser language settings. Variations also tracks the relationships between source and target content to ensure they remain synchronized.

Before jumping into the architectural considerations related to multilingual site development and how to configure variations, it would be useful to take a quick look at how variations and multilingual site considerations have changed with SharePoint 2013 in more detail. As mentioned earlier, Variations existed in earlier versions of SharePoint, but the feature was targeted for much broader usage scenarios, including supporting multiple types of devices. Table 21-2 compares how Variations were used in SharePoint 2010 to how they are used in SharePoint 2013.

TABLE 21-2: Variations

In addition to this new multilingual-only focus with variations, SharePoint 2013 provides several other improvements over SharePoint 2010 variation capabilities:

• Performance improvements and redundancy elimination — The Variations hierarchy creation process takes half the time to process in cases where a new language and target variation is added; and in cases for which the variation process is interrupted, the content propagation process picks up where it left off. List items and documents are decoupled from web pages, so this content propagates independently. For example, if only a document that is linked from a page is updated in the source, only the document is sent to the target, not the entire page.
• Improved flexibility — Content propagation can be centrally managed or adhere to more of a distributed model, whereby targets can opt in to updates and view differences in variations before deciding to pick up any changes.
• Translation capability — Content can be targeted for human translation or machine translation, and used in combination with cross-site publishing to target content across site collections.

Setting Up Variations in a Site Collection

This example walks you through the process of setting up variations, as well as integration with Translation Services. You can either use the same site collection you created earlier in this chapter or create a new one using the Publishing Portal template.

1. Navigate to the site collection you created previously using the Publishing Portal template or create a new one. This will be used for authoring new content.

2. Click on the configuration button represented by the gear icon at the top of the screen and select Site Settings. Because this is the root site in the site collection, the Site Collection Administration section should be visible.

3. Under Site Collection Administration, select Variation Labels. Note that because this site was created as a Publishing Portal, a link to this location is also available on the main page, as previously shown in Figure 21-6. The link is called “Make this site multilingual.”

4. To create a source label, click New Label. Select English as the value for the Language and English (United States) for the Locale sections, and choose the root site collection as the Variations Home by entering a / in the box. Figure 21-7 shows an example of how your page should look.

FIGURE 21-7

5. Choose Publishing Site as the Publishing Site Template in the drop-down and specify the current account you are logged in with as the Label Contact. Click OK to finish. Upon successful creation of the new label, you should be redirected to the page shown in Figure 21-8, indicating label creation was successful. Review the text on the page. Note that SharePoint 2013 uses the terminology variation label synonymously with a variation website.

FIGURE 21-8

Now that you’ve created your source variation label, create one target label as well.

1. Click the OK button to return to the Variation Labels page shown in Figure 21-9, which now displays a new entry for the English variation label you just created.

FIGURE 21-9

2. Click New Label to create a target label. You will be directed to the Configure Your Target Label page, shown in Figure 21-10. If you’ve used variations in the past, you’ll notice immediately that the setup page is very different. Rather than one long form, it is now a wizard-like experience.

FIGURE 21-10

3. The Site Template Language options are based on the language packs you have installed. Variations don’t require language packs, but for all practical purposes you will need them. For example, without the Spanish language pack, the text “Configure Your Target Label” will appear in English to Spanish-speaking users, as opposed to Spanish if you have the Spanish language pack installed. Thus, the “site chrome” appears in the target variation language the way it should with the language pack installed. For this exercise, it isn’t necessary to have language packs installed, but if you have one feel free to select it. Otherwise, use default English as the site template language.

4. For Locale, choose Spanish (Mexico) and click Continue.

5. For the Name Your Target Label page, review the options but keep the default settings. Note that Hierarchy Creation has a few options. Click Continue.

6. On the Translation Options page, note the options to allow or disallow human and machine translation. Use the default settings of Spanish (Mexico) for human translation, and use Spanish for machine translation, as shown in Figure 21-11. Click Continue.

FIGURE 21-11

7. On the Target Label Behavior page, shown in Figure 21-12, you can see the new flexibility provided by the content synchronization behavior. For this exercise you can keep the default settings, but in practice you would want to make this selection based on how much control you want to give content owners on the target label. The label contact will receive an e-mail whenever the source content has changed.

FIGURE 21-12

8. Let’s review the configuration on the Review Label Settings page. Verify that the settings are correct and click Finish. Figure 21-13 shows the Variation Labels page displaying the two labels after completing these steps.

FIGURE 21-13

9. On the Variation Labels page, click Create Hierarchies to create content in the target location. Click OK.

10. Click Variations Settings on the Variation Labels page. The page shown in Figure 21-14 will appear. Note the new options to choose whether to publish selectively or everywhere, as well as how to manage Web Part translation and deleted target content. Keep the default values for this exercise.

FIGURE 21-14

11. Browse to the home page at the root of the site collection, where you will notice that the URL has now changed, with the variation label added to it. You may also see a yellow banner indicating that the page has not been published yet. Click the Publish it link. On the English variation site, click the Follow button in the upper-right corner to add this site to the list of sites you are following.

This completes the configuration of variations. The next few steps illustrate how Machine Translation Services integrate with Variations. Recall that you previously configured the Machine Translation Service earlier in the chapter.

1. Browse to the Spanish variation site. If you’re not sure how to do that, there are several options, but for this example you can browse to the English variation site and then navigate to the Site Settings page.

2. On the Site Settings page, click the “Go to top level site settings” hyperlink in the Site Collection Administration section. Now you are at the root of the site collection.

3. Click the Sites and workspaces link. On the Sites and Workspaces page, you will see the two variation sites listed under the Sites heading. Both the variations were created in the same site collection as the original publishing portal site.

4. Click the Spanish site hyperlink, which should take you to the Variations home page, as shown in Figure 21-15. The yellow banner indicates that this page has not yet been published. Click the Follow button to add it to your Sites list; you can also bookmark the web page for future reference as well. Next you’ll take a closer look at the integration of the Translation Services capability with variations.

FIGURE 21-15

Translation Services Integration with Variations

One new capability that goes hand-in-hand with variations is Translation Services. During the configuration of variations, you saw that an organization has two built-in translation options:

• Machine translation — This option connects to Microsoft Online Translation Service via SSL. Content is automatically translated. Machine translation may not be as accurate, especially with any cultural or colloquial syntax, as human translation, but it is obviously cheaper and quicker than human translation. Machine translation can be disabled by administrators.
• Human translation — SharePoint 2013 now provides a way for source content to be packaged in an industry-standard XML format known as XLIFF. Large translation companies and translation tools support this format, making it much easier for an enterprise to get content translated and imported back in to their SharePoint environment.

An organization can choose whichever option is most suitable for translation content. In many cases, leveraging both translation options is appropriate — using human translation for mission-critical, high-visibility sites, and machine translation for less critical, internal sites. SharePoint will translate SharePoint fields, terms and term properties, and Word and text documents (rtf, txt, html, etc.). There are also term store improvements. Language packs are no longer required to translate content in a term store. Tagging term sets can now be translated as well. Once Machine Translation is configured, the actual process is straightforward. The following exercise walks through the translation options in a little more detail:

1. On the Spanish variation site, click the Variations tab in the Ribbon to reveal the four different options associated with content translation, as shown in Figure 21-16. If the Ribbon is not visible, you can enable it from the configurations drop-down menu by clicking the gear icon. Review each of the four different options on the Variations tab.

FIGURE 21-16

2. Mouse over Create Translation Package to review the description. This option exports the current page as an XLIFF file to be sent for human translation.

3. Repeat the process for each option to become familiar with its capabilities. When you are done, click the Publish link.

4. (Optional) To illustrate the content propagation process, modify the English variation home page by editing the page and changing the content. For example, Figure 21-17 shows changes made to the English variation site. After making your changes, click the Publish tab and then click the Update all targets button. You should receive an acknowledgment in the top-right corner that propagation has been initiated.

FIGURE 21-17

5. (Optional) Navigate to the Spanish variation site and click the Sync from Source button on the Variations tab to initiate content propagation. The content propagation process is controlled by several timer jobs. For the purpose of this exercise, you can manually initiate these jobs to see the effects immediately. Browse to the Job Definitions page by going to the Monitoring page in Central Administration and clicking the Review job definitions link. You will see several different Variations Propagate Timer Jobs associated with the web application that is hosting your Variations site collection. You may see Variations Propagate Timer jobs for other web applications, such as the My Site host, but you are only interested in those for your web application. For each of the Variation Propagate Timer jobs pertinent to your web application, click on the timer job name hyperlink, and select Run Now to manually initiate the content propagation. Return to the Spanish variations site and refresh the page if necessary, and you should see the content changes fully propagated, as shown in Figure 21-18.

FIGURE 21-18

6. (Optional) Click the Machine Translate button on the Variations tab from the Spanish site. This will submit a job for translation. Make sure you have Internet access. Return to the Job Definitions page and execute two timer jobs: the Machine Translation Service - Language Support Timer Job, and the Machine Translation Service - Machine Translation Service Timer Job, to expedite the process. After about 15 minutes, the text on the page should be automatically translated into Spanish, as shown in Figure 21-19.

FIGURE 21-19

Site Publishing Models

SharePoint 2013 introduces a new publishing model called cross-site publishing. This supplements the author-in-place model available in previous versions, making WCM content publishing much more flexible and versatile. Prior to choosing the best model, you should have a good understanding of what type of content is going to be published, how frequently, and whether the content will be reused across multiple sites. For Internet sites, choosing the best publishing model is arguably one of the most important architecture decisions you are going to make. The two publishing models can be briefly described as follows:

• Author-in-place — In this model, content authoring and publishing occurs in a single site collection. Authors and administrators can control publishing via workflow and version control. Author-in-place is the best choice for architectures that don’t require you to author content on more than one site, or publish content to more than one site, or where content reuse is minimal. This would include single-farm deployments for which authors are creating new content inside the production environment, instead of authoring in a testing environment and publishing to the production environment.
• Cross-site publishing — Content authoring can occur in one or more site collections, and the published content can be viewed in one or more site collections using the Search and Content Search Web Parts. Clearly, the capability to separate the authoring and publishing environments is a key new feature. Keep in mind that the publishing sites can also have a different look and feel relative to the authoring sites. Cross-site publishing enables a broad set of new architecture options in SharePoint 2013, some of which are covered later in this section.

Benefits of Cross-Site Publishing

Both publishing models are available and fully supported in SharePoint 2013, but the new cross-site publishing model provides a number of key benefits over the traditional author-in-place approach:

• It enables several architecture options that were never before possible, including multiple authoring sites, and multiple published sites sharing content. This includes multiple authoring sites publishing content to a single site, and a single authoring site simultaneously publishing to multiple sites.
• It provides a separation between authoring and publishing sites, including branding differences.
• It removes site collection boundaries, working across sites, web applications, and even farms.
• It provides the capability to mix authored content and published content easily on the same site.
• It offers more flexibility in terms of site hierarchy and navigation.

As you can see, there are several reasons to consider the cross-site publishing model. SharePoint 2013 provides a number of ways to build your site with this model, while recognizing that not every site requires it.

Organizations that have used previous versions of SharePoint for an Internet site have an advantage when determining which model to use, as they already have a handle on what is working well (and not so well) with the older SharePoint publishing model. Using this information, they can quickly determine whether they want to adopt the same author-in-place publishing model or re-architect their site to follow the new cross-site publishing model.

Cross-Site Publishing Architecture

The search-driven cross-site publishing model is a significant change from previous SharePoint versions. With cross-site publishing in SharePoint 2013, there are some key architectural differences. The following list describes the components of a typical Internet site built with the cross-site publishing model:

• Authoring site collections — Site collections to which authors contribute content. Typically not exposed broadly to end users.
• Publishing site collections — Public-facing Internet sites or internal publishing portals accessible to a broad audience
• Search – Centralized search functionality that enables cross-site publishing. It must be accessible by both the authoring site collections and the publishing site collections.
• Asset libraries — Asset libraries contain picture and video content for the publishing sites. In Internet sites, the asset library must be separate from the authoring site in a web application that allows anonymous access. The asset library must also be available to content authors.
• Term store — The term store is used by both the authoring sites, for tagging content, and the publishing site collections, for managed navigation and publishing tagged items.

Most cross-site publishing solutions have at least two site collections: an authoring site and a publishing site. Your specific solution might have additional site collections depending on the number of catalogs, authoring sites, and publishing sites. If you have requirements for multilingual sites with country code top-level domains (e.g., contoso.com, contoso.mx, contoso.ca), then this could increase the number of publishing site collections. Search, site assets, and metadata configuration can also impact the number of site collections used.

In the case of Internet sites, authoring typically happens on an organization’s internal network. Publishing site collections and asset libraries are typically in the perimeter network, exposed to the Internet, with search able to crawl the authoring content. They are accessible to the Internet publishing site collection for search-driven content.

Content Deployment

For those who have utilized SharePoint’s content deployment capability in the past, you may be wondering what role it plays in SharePoint 2013. In previous versions of SharePoint, the majority of Internet sites used a process known as content deployment to copy content from an authoring environment to the public-facing publishing site. Content deployment did a good job of separating authoring from publishing but it had a few limitations:

• Limited content publishing — Only certain content could be propagated. It was more of an all-or-nothing approach.
• Stability — Stable propagation was a challenge, especially for larger sites. Editing of content on the target sites would quickly lead to problems during content propagation.
• Inflexibility — Fewer configuration options were available.

In SharePoint 2013, content deployment still exists and can be used as a means for getting content from one site to another, but this feature is obviously less relevant now that the power of cross-site publishing is available. As a general rule, if you need to author content and then publish content to another site, you should be using cross-site publishing. Cross-site publishing is a major new capability, and one of the features this chapter spends much more time on; you actually create and implement an Internet site with WCM capability in the next section.

CONFIGURING AND CREATING WCM INTERNET SITES

You have looked at many of the new WCM capabilities, reviewed key considerations that need to be a part of your planning, and configured many services and components to prepare your farm for hosting Internet sites and using WCM capability. In this section, you’ll learn more about the specific steps to actually build out an Internet site and leverage the new WCM capabilities. This includes many more exercises and examples related to building and administering Internet sites. At this point, you have completed the following steps to build an example publishing site with cross-site publishing:

• Created a new authoring publishing portal
• Validated the Distributed Cache service
• Configured the Search service
• Created and configured the Machine Translation Service
• Configured variations on the authoring site
• Configured machine translation and validated on the authoring site
• Configured BLOB cache and object cache on the web application

Several additional exercises in this chapter build on the preceding configuration steps. Each exercise focuses on how to set up and administer new WCM capabilities in SharePoint 2013.

Configuring Cross-Site Publishing

In order to create and configure the new cross-site publishing capability, you need an authoring site collection and a publishing site collection. Typically, the first step is to create site collections using the Publishing Portal site template, which is used for authoring and publishing. Because you have already created the authoring site collection, you can reuse that for this exercise. You will create another site collection that serves as your publishing site collection and your Internet site. Then you will activate the necessary features to enable cross-site publishing.

You will configure the rest of the cross-site publishing settings in the next section, after a brief look at SharePoint’s new catalogs capability.

Using the New Catalogs Capability

Simply put, catalogs provide a way for content to be easily reused across site collections. Catalogs can be HTML-based content from a Pages library, a list, a library of documents, or site assets. SharePoint 2013 provides two ways to create a catalog of information:

• Designate a new or existing list or library as a catalog. To do this, the Cross-Site Collection Publishing feature must be activated, as described in the previous section.
• There is a new type of site collection site template called the Product Catalog. This site collection template was built to include everything an organization needs to author and work with content in a catalog scenario. The site template has all the required features activated, and central to the site is a Product Catalog list as a starting point for managing catalog content.

It is easy to get hung up on the term catalog or product catalog and not see how it is connected to your specific solution. The important thing to note about working with a catalog is that it doesn’t have to contain product information. You can use catalogs for knowledge-based articles, FAQs, services you provide, or any other relevant list of data that you want to expose for consumption via the cross-site publishing model.

Sharing an Existing Library As a Catalog

Earlier in this section you activated Cross-Site Collection Publishing on the authoring site. With this feature activated, you can share any list or library on the site as a catalog. The following example takes you through the process of sharing the Pages library:

1. On the authoring site collection, click the gear icon button in the upper-right corner and select Site Contents.

2. On the Site Contents page, locate the Pages app icon, and click the ellipses (...) button in the top-right corner of the Pages app icon. This brings up information about the Pages library and a link to the library settings, as shown in Figure 21-20.

FIGURE 21-20

3. Click the Settings link to view the Pages library settings. Under General Settings, you’ll see a new library option called Catalog Settings.

4. Click Catalog Settings to open the Catalog Settings configuration page.

5. Check the box that says, “Enable this library as a catalog.” This makes the library content available to other sites and site collections.

6. Add ID as one of the Selected Fields, as shown in Figure 21-21. Note the additional options on the Catalog Settings page. Catalog Navigation is discussed later in the chapter.

FIGURE 21-21

7. Click OK. The Pages library is now a catalog.

Creating and Sharing a Product Catalog

Next, you create a new site collection using the new Catalog Site Collection template, and then share the Product list so other site collections can reuse this information. For this example, you can continue to use the existing web application you’ve used with the previous exercises.

1. Open Central Administration. Under Application Management, click Create site collections. Note the Web Application selector in the upper-right corner of the screen. Be sure to select the correct web application; this is where the new site collection will be hosted.

2. Provide the Title, Description, and Web Site Address (the URL of the site collection). The rest of this example uses “Product Catalog” for the title.

3. For Template Selection, click the Publishing tab and then select Product Catalog.

4. Enter the name of a Primary Site Collection Administrator and a secondary one if desired. You could select a Quota Template too, but for this exercise you can leave this blank.

5. Click OK. After a few seconds the new site collection will be created and you are presented with a link to open it in a new browser window. Figure 21-22 shows part of the home page of the newly created Product Catalog site collection. Catalog-specific configuration settings are available on the main page. Note that the Products list is also visible.

FIGURE 21-22

6. The next step is to share the Products list. You can navigate to the list and share it just as you did for sharing the Pages library, or you can click the Products link on the left side of the home page.

7. From the Products list page, click the LIST tab, and then click the List Settings button on the far-right side of the Ribbon.

8. Select Catalog Settings, and check the box that says “Enable this library as a catalog.”

9. Add Item Number as a Selected Field, and select Item Category in the Catalog Navigation drop-down.

10. Click OK. The Products library is now available to other sites as a catalog.

Connecting to a Catalog from a Publishing Site

As a refresher, the examples in this chapter take you through the process of creating a basic cross-site publishing architecture. At this point you have two different catalogs configured, the Products library and the authoring site’s Pages library. Use the following steps to connect to this content in the publishing site:

1. Go to the Site Settings page for the publishing Internet site you created earlier.

2. Click the Manage Catalog Connections link under the Site Administration section.

3. In the Manage catalog connections page, click the Connect to a catalog link.

4. The Pages and Products catalogs should both be displayed in the list. In some cases, you may not see the catalogs listed, and instead see a yellow banner indicating that a search crawl is necessary, as shown in Figure 21-23. After performing a full crawl, your two catalogs should be listed, as shown in Figure 21-24. Click Connect for the Products catalog, which will take you to the Catalog Source Settings page.

FIGURE 21-23

FIGURE 21-24

5. On the Catalog Source Settings page, you can see that there are several different configuration settings. Many of these are associated with navigation hierarchy and how the content in the catalog will integrate into the site. Review all the different settings, but for now leave these at their defaults. You will return to this page in subsequent examples and update these settings to build the site out more fully. Click OK to connect the catalog.

Branding

As illustrated earlier in the first table of this chapter, branding is typically a mission-critical part of creating an Internet site. It is also a very important aspect of the overall publishing experience, and one of the main design decisions in the process of building an Internet site. Chapter 12 focuses entirely on branding, so be sure to read or review the capabilities it describes in depth, and then return to this chapter. However, because branding plays such a prominent role in Internet sites, this section briefly highlights the Design Manager, device channels, and the Snippet Gallery, as well as special branding considerations for Internet sites.

Design Manager

Web designers typically build out site designs using a tool such as Adobe Dreamweaver or another HTML-type editor; and they generally use HTML, CSS, and JavaScript as the key building blocks during the design phase. The challenge with previous versions of SharePoint is that once an organization agreed on a particular look and feel, the process to convert it from an HTML-based design to a working SharePoint-based solution was tedious and relied heavily on .NET developers. A new tool in SharePoint 2013 called the Design Manager greatly simplifies this process.

The Design Manager is more than just a design import utility; it walks the designer through several steps to build and tweak custom branding for the site. From the site’s home page, you can browse to the Design Manager tool, shown in Figure 21-25, by clicking the gear icon and choosing the Designer Manager option on the drop-down menu. Using the Design Manager, designers can make ongoing changes to their design using the HTML editor of their choice. This includes an easy way to update master pages, page layouts, and display templates. A completed design can be packaged using the Design Manager as well.

FIGURE 21-25

A key component of the Design Manager is the capability to create device channels, which can be used to display content geared specifically to the device that is being used to browse the site. The different channels can be ranked such that certain channels take precedence over others. This way, if a particular browser matches two channels, the rankings can determine which channel to apply. With each different channel, designers can specify a different master page and CSS. Page layouts are used with all device channels, but within the page layout designers can leverage the new Device Channel Panel container control to designate page layout content that is unique for a particular channel. For example, the Device Channel Panel container can be used on a page layout when a designer wishes to remove a column of content for smartphone rendering.

Once a design is imported via the Design Manager, the site designer can use a tool in Design Manager called the Snippet Gallery to insert or replace specific design elements with the proper SharePoint 2013 markup. For example, Web Part zones, top navigation, or the top page controls can be configured through wizard-like pages, and then the correct markup is provided to the designer.

Using the Snippet Gallery and device channels in combination with the Design Manager gives designers much better control over the user experience for each targeted mobile platform, which makes browsing SharePoint 2013 websites a mobile-friendly experience. After a brief detour for a look at branding considerations specific to Internet sites, you’ll configure a device channel.

Branding Considerations for Internet Sites

Internet sites should be designed with a few unique branding considerations in mind. First, to ensure the best user experience, SharePoint websites must load rapidly to display information. Because optimum performance is critical, careful attention needs to be paid to things such as caching, downloading the minimum amount and types of content, and using minimal CSS. Fortunately, SharePoint 2013 has a complete set of tools to configure a SharePoint site this way. Image renditions, a new CSS model, and caching tools are beneficial for these purposes.

Second, an organization has very little control over the types of browsers and devices used to access its Internet site. Therefore, channels and device targeting (and testing with those devices!) provide a huge benefit for tailoring and optimizing the user experience.

Finally, branding an Internet site typically includes unique security requirements. In earlier versions of SharePoint this often meant that two separate farms and content deployment was part of the architecture. In those cases, authoring farms would have similar but slightly different branding from the production Internet site. With cross-site publishing, the authoring environment can look significantly different from the publishing site’s branding.

Configuring Device Channels

While this section won’t dig too deeply into branding, it does spend a little time looking at the channels feature in the Design Manager and walks you through the steps to create a channel. From an administration standpoint, this will give you some high-level hands-on experience with the Design Manager.

1. Go to the publishing Internet site you created earlier, and navigate to the Design Manager page by clicking the gear icon and choosing the Design Manager option.

2. Select option 2, Manage Device Channels.

3. By default, one device channel is available. Click the link Create a channel to display the Device Channels - New Item dialog.

4. Fill in the form, targeting a specific browser or device. In the example, the Firefox browser is used. For the alias, create a short descriptive string without any spaces. The most important section here is Device Inclusion Rules. This must be a substring from a user agent value. In this case, “Firefox” is used. Be sure to activate it only when the channel is fully configured in production. Click Active for this exercise to test the channel process. Click OK. Figure 21-26 shows a completed form.

FIGURE 21-26

5. To customize your new channel, click option 7 in the Design Manager, the Publish and Apply Design link.

6. In the center text on this page, click the link “Assign master pages to your site based on device channel,” which will take you to the Site Master Page Settings dialog.

7. Note the Firefox option in this section. In the drop-down menu next to the Firefox entry, change the value to oslo, which is one of the choices in the drop-down menu.

8. Using the Firefox browser, browse to the Internet site and verify that the Oslo master page is invoked.

This exercise took you through the process of setting up a channel and selecting a different master page, but channels can also be used to update the master page and page layouts to target content to specific channels only. This is done in the Design Manager using a new snippet feature called Device Channel Panels, and site designers can use different image renditions for specific channels using JavaScript in the page designs, providing a more optimized mobile experience. Image renditions are discussed in more detail later in this chapter.

Navigation

SharePoint 2013 provides some powerful new capabilities and options for site navigation. With previous versions of SharePoint, the only option available when using out-of-the-box navigation controls and settings was structured navigation. The site navigation was built from the site structure and pages in the site collection. Brand new in SharePoint 2013 is the capability to create managed navigation, based on a specific managed metadata term set.

The new navigation option provides several important benefits. Menu options can be updated quickly and easily through the Term Store Management tool. Administrators have the ability to copy the term set and translate it into other languages for multilingual sites, or even build navigation by combining multiple navigation term sets across different site collections. Using managed navigation, an organization can build SharePoint sites with friendly, intuitive URLs in a new way, enabling new scenarios and removing barriers that existed in previous SharePoint versions.

One new navigation approach in SharePoint 2013 is the capability to combine parts of different term sets across sites. This is particularly interesting in scenarios in which an organization uses a product catalog to surface content through cross-site publishing. The following examples build on previous exercises in this chapter, walking you through the process of combining term sets to form a single navigation for the Internet site.

Setting Up Managed Navigation in a Publishing Site

The following steps walk you through configuring managed navigation.

1. Go to the publishing Internet site you created earlier. Click the option Configure navigation, which is located on the main page. Alternatively, on the Site Settings page, click the Navigation link.

2. On the Navigation Settings page, select Managed Navigation for both the Global Navigation and Current Navigation settings.

3. You haven’t configured a navigation term set yet, so under Managed Navigation: Term Set, select Create Term Set.

4. When you receive an acknowledgment in green text stating “Successfully created term set...,” click the link to open the Term Store Management tool.

5. Locate your new term set in the navigation tree, click on the name, and in the drop-down menu select Create Term. Assign the value “Home” to the term.

6. Repeat the process two more times, creating terms for About Us and Careers.

7. Note the additional tabs across the top for the term set, surfacing property settings specific to navigation. Click the Intended Use tab and ensure that “Use this Term Set for Site Navigation” is checked, as shown in Figure 21-27.

FIGURE 21-27

8. Click the Translation and Term-Driven Pages tabs to see additional options.

9. Click on a term such as Home and then note the change in the tabs specific to this term. Click Navigation and Term-Driven Pages to view the different options.

10. Under the Term-Driven Pages tab, check the box next to “Change target page for this term.”

11. Browse to default.aspx in the Pages library and select it as the target page. Click the Save button.

12. Click the About Us term and repeat the process, but choose the PageNotFoundError.aspx file in the Pages library.

13. Click the Careers term. Under the Navigation tab, select the radio button Simple Link or Header and leave the text box blank. This will leave Careers as an item on the navigation but without a hyperlink.

14. Return to the Navigation settings (see step 2) and ensure that Managed Navigation is selected for global navigation and your newly created term set is selected in the Managed Navigation: Term Set section (see Figure 21-28). Click OK to save the configuration.

FIGURE 21-28

15. Return to the Internet site and note the new global navigation. Click the Home link and verify the managed navigation and the friendly URL, as shown in Figure 21-29. Also confirm the managed navigation for About Us, as shown in Figure 21-30, and confirm that Careers is not hyperlinked. This step verifies the new managed navigation settings you configured.

FIGURE 21-29

FIGURE 21-30

Building a Term Set for Product Catalog Tagging

In this next exercise you will quickly build up a term set for the Product Catalog site, and populate the catalog site with a few items to make it more interesting. For this example, assume you are a travel agent, and the products in this case are vacation packages:

1. Go to the Product Catalog site you created previously. Navigate to Site Settings and click the Term store management link.

2. The Product Hierarchy term set should already exist. If not, create a new term set.

3. Click the Product Hierarchy term set and choose Create Term, and specify Vacation Packages for the new term.

4. Continue building out your term set until it looks like the hierarchy shown in Figure 21-31. This is only an example; you can choose to build any hierarchy you choose.

FIGURE 21-31

Now that you have created a simple term set that loosely correlates to your product categories, you will associate it with the catalog list.

Configuring Combined Navigation Using Cross-Site Publishing

The final example in this section walks you through the process of using managed navigation to combine navigation elements from multiple sources to build a complete managed navigation solution. First you built a simple managed navigation solution with three items. Then you built a term set and a Products catalog. Now, using the following steps, you integrate that catalog term set into the site navigation, and consume that content via search:

1. Go to the publishing Internet site and navigate to the Site Settings page. Select Manage Catalog Connections.

2. Previously, you set up a catalog connection to the Products catalog, as shown in Figure 21-32. Click the Disconnect link on the page so you can start fresh again. Then click the Disconnect button on the Disconnect Catalog dialog when prompted.

FIGURE 21-32

3. Click the Connect to a catalog option and select the Products catalog from the list of available catalogs.

4. Under Connection Integration, choose “Integrate the catalog into my site.” This integrates the catalog contents into the site.

5. Under Navigation Hierarchy, leave the value as Item Category and click the Tag icon to bring up the term set. Select Vacation Packages as the root term set to use and leave the “Include root term in site navigation” check box disabled.

6. Leave the additional settings as is, scroll down to the bottom of the page, and click OK. When the catalog connection process is complete, the term set from the Products catalog should be displayed on the global navigation, as shown in Figure 21-33.

FIGURE 21-33

7. Click on one of the terms in the hierarchy, such as California, and you’ll navigate to a dynamically created page displaying the image that is mapped via the Item Category value to the California term, as shown in Figure 21-34. Note that this page is in draft mode and has not yet been published. If you don’t see an image, ensure that you choose a term that you added to one of your items in the Products list when you populated the list with content. Also note the URL containing the term-set hierarchy, and the left-hand side navigation, which has been updated. Choose another term in the hierarchy to view a different page, and you’ll see that the URL and left-hand side navigation are updated dynamically.

FIGURE 21-34

You have successfully published content in one site collection to another site collection while creating friendly URLs based on managed navigation. Anytime the content is updated in the Products catalog, your web pages will be automatically updated after the new content has been crawled by the search service. This illustrates some of the power of cross-site publishing.

Authoring Site Navigation

Before concluding this section, it is important to note that the authoring environment in the cross-site publishing model is often a separate site collection from the published Internet site. As a result, it often has different navigation. The two sites could share a common term set, but in most cases it is better to use the default structured navigation for the authoring site to help content authors create content more easily.

Search-Driven Content

With the cross-site publishing model, content is delivered to Internet sites, or any sites, via search. You already looked at some ways in which search-driven content is delivered through configuring catalog connections and managed navigation. This section covers some additional methods for surfacing search-driven content in SharePoint 2013.

From an administrative perspective, several new search settings are available at the site collection level. One important capability is Query Rules. Query Rules are SharePoint’s attempt to return results that users intended, as opposed to what they actually requested. That’s correct — search is attempting to understand intent. To create a Query Rule, you specify one or more conditions and correlated actions. If any of the conditions are met, then the actions are implemented with the purpose of improving the relevance of the search results. Query Rules can also be used to fine-tune the ranking of results or to promote specific results, similar to what Best Bets did in SharePoint 2010.

Chapter 13 covers Query Rules in much more detail, but their capability is also covered here for completeness. Search result sets are processed through Query Rules in SharePoint 2013. Query Rules, which are managed at the site collection level, enable site designers to specify conditions, actions, and publishing values.

To access the Query Rules feature, go to the Site Collection Administration section on the Site Settings page. The Search Query Rules link takes you to the Manage Query Rules page shown in Figure 21-35.

FIGURE 21-35

Another aspect of search-driven content is the use of refiners and faceted navigation. In the past, these elements have been a part of search solutions or on the search center site. But in SharePoint 2013, these capabilities are now a design element that can be reused on WCM sites to help deliver rich, dynamic navigation, and provide site users with the most relevant content. For example, if a user were navigating a site and wanted to filter vacation packages based on specific amenities, the specific amenities could be a refinement option on the category page. The Refinement Panel Web Part or Search Navigation Web Part can be used throughout an Internet site to provide a compelling and dynamic navigation experience.

Content Search Web Parts

The new Content Search Web Part is incredibly powerful, returning results from any site collection. Yes, that’s correct, any site collection. After content has been crawled, it becomes available to any site collection throughout the farm.

Display templates are an important part of the Content Search Web Part. There are two types of display template. The control display template determines the overall container design for the Web Part. The item display template defines the look and feel for an individual item (think in terms of catalog items). When you add a Content Search Web Part to a page, the configuration settings include the option to choose both the control and item display templates. You can easily update or create new templates using HTML and JavaScript.

You can also use the Content Search Web Part in conjunction with other search capabilities, such as managed navigation and category pages. In fact, in the previous example, Content Search Web Parts were delivering the real-time content to both the category page and the item page. This content publishing was established by connecting the catalogs and managed navigation. This all happened automatically as part of the catalog connection process, but this section takes you behind the scenes to understand this process a bit better.

Finally, administrators can control some aspects of the overall performance of the Content Search Web Parts, such as enabling client-side rendering using HTML and JavaScript templates. Administrators should also understand this feature’s limitations. For example, Content Search Web Parts execute in batches of five. This means that if you add a sixth Content Search Web Part to the page, it might render significantly slower.

Adding and Configuring a Content Search Web Part

The following steps describe how to add a Content Search Web Part to your publishing site and configure it:

1. Return to your Internet site that you connected to the Products catalog.

2. On the main page, click Edit in the upper right-hand corner of the page to go into edit mode.

3. For this exercise, you’ll add a Content Search Web Part to the main page. While still in edit mode, click a location in the Page Content section at the top, and then click Insert on the Ribbon and choose Web Part. If you haven’t already, explore the Web Part categories and options. You’ll notice a category called Search-Driven Content that contains several Web Parts that enable you to build search-driven sites. This includes Video, Items Matching a Tag, and the adaptive-site capabilities surfaced through Recommended Items and Popular Items. More information on adaptive sites is included later in the chapter.

4. The Content Search Web Part is actually in the Content Rollup category. Click on this category and select the Content Search Web Part. Click Add to add the Web Part to the page.

5. You will update the Web Part properties to show vacation packages. On the right side of the Web Part, click the drop-down menu and select Edit Web Part. This brings up the Content Search Web Part properties.

6. Under Search Criteria, select Change query. This opens a wizard with which you can build your query.

7. In the Select a query section, click the drop-down menu, and choose Products Catalog - Product Results. You are going to pull data from the Products catalog that you set up earlier in the chapter. Search Result Preview shows the expected results for the query. Initially you’ll see a list of all the Products catalog items in your list. In this example you will filter this down to items tagged with California.

8. Click the Refiners tab at the top of the window. On the left side is a list of potential refiners. Scroll down and choose California, and then click the Add button. The Search Result Preview window will be updated with the item that was tagged with the California term.

9. Click OK to select the query settings, and return to the main page. Click Apply in the properties dialog for the changes to show up on the left.

10. Next, you want to change how the results are displayed on the page. Under Display Templates in the Properties dialog, you’ll see an option for Control (the overall display of the content in the Web Part) and Item (the individual item display).

11. Choose Slideshow in the Control drop-down, and Large picture from the Item drop-down.

12. Click OK in the Web Part properties panel to apply the changes, and close the dialog.

13. Click the Save and Publish buttons, successively, on the Ribbon. Now you should see your new home page with the Content Search Web Part, as shown in Figure 21-36.

FIGURE 21-36

Now you have seen two different ways to achieve cross-site publishing, but both approaches utilize the search services. Hopefully, at this point, you are convinced of the power of this new publishing capability.

Analytics Processing Engine

The Analytics Processing Engine in SharePoint 2013 isn’t completely new. It has some of the same capabilities as the Web Analytics service application from SharePoint 2010, but it has been redesigned and significantly improved to deliver a lot more value.

The Analytics Processing Engine tracks data and clickstream events that occur in the SharePoint farm, generating reports that are accessible to administrators. It does much more than just usage processing with data delivered as reports, however. The processing engine is also able to mine data from your SharePoint sites and surface these findings right back in your site dynamically. Organizations can easily build a SharePoint 2013 site that recommends related content on the fly with special Web Parts.

Two types of data or analysis are available with the Analytics Processing Engine:

• Search analytics — Content that is added to the system via search
• Usage analytics — Usage information such as related content, user actions, clickstream activity, or viewed items

The processing engine builds reports with data about general SharePoint usage, popularity of content, and popularity trends. It will generate recommendations and then capture whether those recommendations are viewed. The event model is extensible too, so custom usage events can be added and tracked. In Site Settings, under the Site Collection Administration section, there is an option called Popularity and Search Reports that will take you to the View Usage Reports page, shown in Figure 21-37. You should familiarize yourself with each type of report available.

FIGURE 21-37

There are also new features and capabilities whose sole purpose is to aggregate the dynamic, mined data and display it immediately on a page for viewing, such as the Recommended Items Web Part or the Popular Items Web Part. Administrators can also use the data to determine the most popular items on a list or library, as shown in Figure 21-38, which shows the Products catalog. Note on the Ribbon there is a button called Popularity Trends. You should review this capability, as it is new to SharePoint 2013.

FIGURE 21-38

Search Engine Optimization

SharePoint 2013 provides several improvements related to search engine optimization (SEO), which is news that will excite any Internet website administrator. The following table highlights new capabilities in SharePoint 2013 from the SEO point of view:

Webmaster Tools and SEO Site Settings

From an administrative perspective, site collection owners now have a Search Engine Optimization Settings link under the Site Collection Administration heading in Site Settings. This dialog, shown in Figure 21-39, provides guidance to site administrators about how to register their site with Bing or Google to validate site ownership. This dialog also provides site administrators with options for managing link consolidation in specific scenarios. Review the ownership verification and link consolidation sections so you understand these new features.

FIGURE 21-39

Generating a Search Engine Sitemap

Another important way to improve SEO on Internet sites is to provide search engines with an up-to-date sitemap. Administrators can enable this capability for their Internet sites by activating the Search Engine Sitemap feature at the site collection level. You should ensure that anonymous access is enabled on the Internet site, which is usually the case, but it is worth emphasizing.

That’s all there is to it. The map will be built regularly and public search engines can consume it to understand URL and site structure for better crawling.

AUTHORING CONTENT IMPROVEMENTS

For an Internet site to be successful, it is important to consider the authoring experience and how content is added and updated. This next few sections provide a brief discussion of some of the authoring improvements in SharePoint 2013, looking at the new features in the context of Internet sites.

Rich Text Editor Improvements

SharePoint content can be copied directly from Microsoft Word and pasted into a Rich Text Editor Web Part or directly on the page, now with significant improvements in the HTML. Content contributors who have used previous versions of SharePoint are familiar with all the extra HTML markup that was copied over in this scenario. With SharePoint 2013, text formatting, tables, and headings remain intact, without the extra markup that used to be included in this copy/paste scenario. The Paste Clean option shown in Figure 21-40 copies content from the clipboard and removes unnecessary markup. In addition, on the far right side of the Ribbon, note the option to convert HTML to XHTML-compliant markup.

FIGURE 21-40

SharePoint 2013 also provides authors with a built-in method for adding iframe code to their page, making it very easy to add external videos or maps to a page. To provide governance of this feature, a new site setting was added, called HTML Field Security. This is configured at the site collection level using the HTML Field Security link under the Site Collection Administration section of the Site Settings page. The HTML Field Security dialog is shown in Figure 21-41. From here, administrators can enable and disable the iframe insertion capability, or specify that iframes can only be contributed from a list of approved source sites.

FIGURE 21-41

Using Video Support Enhancements

It is becoming increasingly common for Internet sites to leverage video, including simple getting-started videos, how-to guides, product announcements, and more. This rapid adoption of video as a central component of Internet sites is expected to increase.

SharePoint 2013 provides a new video content type, and the process for uploading video is improved over previous SharePoint versions. There is also much better support for embedded videos, and video preview is built in as well. SharePoint 2013 defaults to the HTML5 video player whenever possible and reverts to Silverlight only when necessary. Authors also have the capability to use a new video set content type that can store multiple video files with different renditions. The built-in video player defaults to the lowest bandwidth rendition.

SharePoint 2013 also provides richer templates for displaying video, and it offers an improved video experience in search as well. Finally, SharePoint 2013 automatically generates thumbnail preview images when a video is uploaded into SharePoint. Together, these improvements in video support provide content authors and site administrators with an improved set of tools to deliver content-rich websites.

Image Renditions

The image renditions feature is an important new content authoring capability in SharePoint 2013. Image renditions enable authors to upload one image and then display different versions, or renditions, of the image within the site based on a specified size, width, or crop configuration. For example, an author might upload one image from a digital camera and then use this image in two locations across the site — one location requiring a fairly large image and the other a thumbnail display. The author can use different image renditions of that single image, which are automatically generated when the file is uploaded. The author can also edit a particular rendition to choose a particular section of the image to display.

When you create a rendition you can specify the dimensions, and then every image that uses that rendition will adhere to the specified size. Image renditions provide a simple yet highly efficient way to create and use multiple smaller versions of one very large image throughout the site.

Creating a New Image Rendition Template

You can easily configure the image renditions that will be generated on the site. Four rendition templates are created by default. The following steps describe the process to create a new template:

In the next exercise you’ll take a look at an asset library to verify that the new image rendition is being generated for images in the site.

Customizing the Image Rendition

In the previous exercise you added a new image rendition template. Now you will look at an asset library to view the renditions that are produced, editing any as desired.

1. Go to the Images asset library that is part of the Product Catalog website, or choose any other asset library you prefer.

2. Add images to this library if it is empty. This example uses the same images used previously for the managed navigation exercise.

3. Choose an image to view, and then click the ellipses (...) to open a dialog for that specific image, as shown in Figure 21-42.

FIGURE 21-42

4. Click the Edit Renditions link to view the generated renditions for this image. You should see five different renditions, including a rendition based on your new template created in the last exercise. Review the different renditions and the additional information on the page.

5. Choose a rendition to edit, and click the Click to change hyperlink.

6. Edit the rendition in the pop-up by selecting the portions of the image you wish to display. Click the Save button when you are finished.

As you can see, it is extremely easy to configure image renditions, define templates, and then customize the generated image renditions. Once renditions are generated, site designers and administrators can use the RenditionID value and URL to choose a specific rendition for a display template. This is especially helpful when creating experiences targeted at mobile devices.

SUMMARY

In this chapter you looked at the new WCM features and functionality in SharePoint 2013, and then reviewed these capabilities in the context of architecting and implementing an Internet website. You learned what key considerations were important as you architect, create, and administer your site. We also looked at WCM authoring improvements in SharePoint 2013. Cross-site publishing provides capability to publish content from a single site to multiples sites, and from multiple sites into a single site. The Content Search Web Part plays a significant role for aggregating content across sites collections. In general, the search architecture and functionality plays a very big role in the WCM capability. There are so many new capabilities and options available for WCM and creating Internet sites that administrators should consider utilizing SharePoint 2013 as their platform for such sites.