1. Why SharePoint for Internet-facing Web Sites?
Before we dive into some of the functionality
associated with WCM, let’s look at some of the key reasons why
organizations use SharePoint for their Internet sites:
Ease of use.
Part of the appeal of SharePoint has always been its low threshold for
entry. Users can be trained very quickly to use specific functionality
and require very little training for uploading and managing content.
You already own it (business users).
For those organizations that have already invested in SharePoint as
part of an internal collaboration or communication initiative, they can
leverage that very same software for allowing designated employees to
manage Internet content with no additional training.
You already own it (IT).
Again, for those organizations already familiar with SharePoint, it is
much easier to quantify IT support for an Internet-facing site. IT
knows how to manage and maintain a SharePoint environment because they
already do that for internal usage.
Leverage list data.
Web sites do not have to be a collection of static HTML content.
SharePoint allows you to easily leverage list data for content
presentation. This makes it easier to deploy and maintain dynamic
content presentation without having to manage the underlying HTML.
Search.
SharePoint has a native search engine that will support the discovery
experience associated with looking for keyword matches on your Web
site. There is no need to purchase third-party search products to
integrate into your WCM solution.
Content repurposing.
The life cycle of a document can span the boundary of the corporate
firewall. What was once created through employee collaboration can
ultimately serve high value to partners, clients, or customers. By
leveraging SharePoint for intranet, extranet, and even Internet use,
content can be shared naturally, via workflow, from system to another.
And
those are just a few reasons! Because of these and many others,
SharePoint has gained tremendous momentum in the Internet-facing WCM
space. SharePoint 2010 takes advantage of that momentum and raises the
bar associated with what companies can do with their Web sites. It is
now easier to leverage native capabilities in SharePoint to create a
highly dynamic, rich, aesthetically pleasing corporate Web site.
2. Web Content Management: The Basics
SharePoint 2010 offers the capability to manage Web
content (pages, images, and HTML) in an easy way. This allows business
users to author and publish Web content quickly and easily without
having to involve IT or a webmaster for each and every new page or
update to a page. This enables your Internet site to take on any look
and feel (unlike the default SharePoint UI that most people think of)
and scale to the requirements of the world’s most popular Web sites.
For example, take a look at Figure 1. This
is a default SharePoint Web page. For a business user to make a change
to the page, it’s as simple as clicking the Edit icon (paper with a
pencil over it) in the toolbar or by clicking the Page toolbar item and
selecting Edit from the ribbon. The result is that the page can be
modified in Edit mode (see Figure 2),
eliminating the need for the user to ask IT to make a Web page
modification on his or her behalf. Finally, the page can be run through
an approval process (see Figure 3), ensuring that changes are reviewed before going live to the Internet.
There are entire books dedicated to
creating, managing, and hosting Web content-managed sites, so we won’t
try to re-create those here in a few pages. Instead, we provide the
basics of how SharePoint provides Web content management features.
