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Step-by-Step: A Simple SharePoint WCM (Web Content Management) How To Guide (from Authoring to Approval and Publishing)

25 January, 2012 by 2 Comments

The purpose of this article is to show how you can design and implement a web content management (WCM) solution based on SharePoint 2010 Publishing Feature, which should handle the entire content publishing process: authoring – review and approval on the staging environment – Publication on the live environment using a content deployment job.

About Publishing and Content Deployment

First of all I would like to point some interesting articles on  Microsoft TechNet web site:

SharePoint Topology Design

In this case I have implemented a very simple infrastructure (all the machines are connected in the same LAN):

  • Domain Controller – This server has the Active Directory, DNS and Certificate Services.
  • Exchange Server – Here I have implemented Exchange 2010, only for internal use. It is very useful to have it in order to be able to test the approval workflow within SharePoint.
  • SQL 2008 R2 Server – A standard implementation of SQL Server 2008 R2. I use this server for both SharePoint1 and SharePoint2 farms.
  • SharePoint1 – This server will be the Staging / Authoring SharePoint farm.
  • SharePoint2 – This server will be the Live SharePoint farm.

The two farms – SharePoint1 and SharePoint2 are separate farms with different service accounts event though they are sharing the same SQL Server. In a real environment if we want to use SharePoint as WCM for a web site, the SharePoint2 farm will be located in DMZ, but this is another story.

Basically we are going to use http://staging for authoring and reviewing and then deploy the content to http://live.

How To Do It

1. Implement Approval using the SharePoint Publishing Feature

In order to use the default approval we need to:

  • Create a publishing portal.
  • Use Publishing Site with Workflow site template to create new sites. By default this will be the only option available when creating a new site.


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Content Rollup Web Parts

16 October, 2011 by Leave a Comment

I want in this post just to give 2 basic graphic examples of how to use the standard content rollup web parts available in SharePoint. I think this is content aggregation made easy :) .

Table of Contents Web Part

Content Query Web Parts

I don’t want to transform this post into another Content Query Web Part technical post, a great example can be found on the Microsoft Technet – How to: Customize the SharePoint Content By Query Web Part by Using Custom Properties (ECM).

Regarding Content Query Web Part, my open question is: how deep is this rabbit hole? I personally find it the most powerful out of the box web part existing in SharePoint 2010.

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Built-in Publishing Page Layouts Examples

16 October, 2011 by Leave a Comment

When you create a publishing page, among the default page layouts you can find many layouts, from which the following layouts are bounded to the Article Page content type: Body Only, Image on Left, Image on Right, Summary links.


The Article Page Content Type inherits the Page content type and has the following specific fields:

  • Page Image – Publishing Image
  • Page Content – Publishing HTML
  • Summary Links – Summary Links
  • Byline – Single line of text
  • Article Date – Date and Time
  • Image Caption – Publishing HTML

These fields can be used to store the page related data (information, picture, links etc) offering two major advantages compared to a standard HTML page:

  • The information is “normalized” – even if this term is more common to the database design rather web pages. I would like to point that the main advantages of structuring the page information in this way are: the logical structure of the information and accessibility from search (for example you can define a search scope to filter the information based on the Byline – Author filed)
  • Standard page design

Now, let’s see how are these fields mapped in some layout examples:

Article Page – Image on Left

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SharePoint Publishing Feature Page Content Types Overview

10 October, 2011 by Leave a Comment

When we speak about content types I think there are some common general principles:

  • all the content types are children of  the visible Item content type (there is also a Parent for this, called _System but is hidden).
  • you should look at the content types as they are Business Entities (with the columns being the fields). By design they have a parent and they inherit all the columns defined within the parent.
  • a great advantage provided by the content types is that you have the possibility to enforce the data structure throughout the site collection. For example if you want to add a new column which must be pushed throughout all the Page Layout Content Type, you could add it in the Page content type.
  • you can define documents templates and page layouts and attach them to the content types. Every time when you are going to use that content type in a library the templates will be available too.

You can find detailed information on the Content type and workflow planning (SharePoint Server 2010) article on TechNet.
In the image below you can see how the publishing feature page content types are defined as children of the system content types (each child content type shows only the incremental differences from the parent):

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