The History and the Myth

 

I receive a lot of questions in regards to Web Content Management via SharePoint 2007, and it has become clear that there is a lot of confusion as to what exactly it is. And, I must admit, I suffered through these same questions when I started with SharePoint. So, I thought the best place to start was the creation of “The Beginner’s Guide to SharePoint: Web Content Management”. But, more specifically, how does it fit in the grand scheme of things?

 

There is a great deal of knowledge around SharePoint in general. Specifically, this is most often knowledge around Windows SharePoint Services (WSS). Unfortunately, this usually leads to an initial misunderstanding of the complete capabilities of Microsoft Office SharePoint Server (MOSS) 2007.

 

Windows SharePoint Services (WSS) 3.0 is a base set of functionality that most people associate with the stereotypical SharePoint functionality. MOSS however, which includes WSS 3.0, has a huge amount of added functionality that go way beyond WSS. These include:

 

  • Business Workflow (customizable workflows, smart client, document conversions)
  • Search (Amazing search with new features like Federated results, context, etc.)
  • Enterprise Content Management (versioning, compliance, web content management)
  • Collaboration (blogs, portals, email, wiki)
  • Business intelligence (BI portals built on SQL Analysis Services)
  • Single Signon (Single point of authentication for third party applications)

MOSS 2007 Features 

This arguably makes MOSS 2007 the most powerful server product, or at least, the server with the broadest vision, that Microsoft has released to date.

 

One of the new components in MOSS 2007 is the Web Content Management component. For initial understanding of the power of this product, we must remove it from the context of SharePoint for just a moment. Since 2001, the standard offering from Microsoft geared towards helping companies manage their web efforts from a content perspective, was Microsoft Content Management Server (MCMS) 2002. It was one of the most widely implemented CMS applications at the time. To give you an idea of how widely and completely companies adopted the software, it was still the standard prior to SharePoint 2007, giving it a run of almost 7 years. In software years, that’s an eternity.

 

As you can imagine, there are a lot of internet ideologies that have become standard in that time. Intranet collaboration, Portals, and Document Management are just a few of these new concepts that the original CMS application failed to meet. Enter the picture: SharePoint. So, for a few years now, companies have been adopting both CMS technologies for front end websites and SharePoint for collaboration portals, list management, document management, versioning, etc.

It didn’t take long for the frustration to take hold. Why can’t CMS take advantage of these new concepts? When is the next version going to come out? Microsoft was clearly faced with a dilemma. Do we enhance the CMS product to incorporate compatibility of SharePoint? What would that mean in terms of the marketing of those products? Would they, in some strange way, compete with one another?

 

Since web strategies for companies seem to be heading towards a single, unified concept, it isn’t surprising that Microsoft decided to unify SharePoint and the old CMS product. As an opinion, I think this idea was fantastic. However, to be completely honest, I think there was a huge mistake made when naming this “new” product. “Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007” just doesn’t speak to the scope of the CMS component. While the ability to natively interact and integrate SharePoint functionality into your website is nothing short of revolutionary, it leads to a great deal of misconception.

 

And here we are. The reason I am writing this article. To help dispel the myth of limitations or preconceived notions about SharePoint 2007: Web Content Management (WCM). What it is. What it is not. Finally, we will explore how to use it.