Publishing and Web Content Management : New in SharePoint 2013 (part 2) - Catalog Enable List/Library

Cross-Site Publishing and Catalog Enabled Lists and Libraries

Cross-site publishingis a new feature in SharePoint 2013 that enables content owners to create content in one site collection and publish the same content in another site collection. If a content owner updates the content in the source collection then the update shows in the dependent collections. Cross-site publishing requires catalog enabled lists and libraries, as well as search configuration to work.

Figure 5 shows the infrastructure for cross-site publishing. Lists and libraries within the source site collection must enable cross-site publication and a search must crawl over these lists and libraries before the content is available in destination site collections.

Figure 5. Cross-site publishing infrastructure

Destination site collections use cross-site published content via Content Search Web Parts. These Content Search Web Parts use the search index to retrieve the content from the source collection.

Catalog Enable List/Library

I shall now demonstrate this configuration, as follows:

1. Navigate to your publishing site collection.
2. Click the gear icon.
3. Select Site settings from the menu.
4. Click the link to access the site collection features, under Site Collection Administration.
5. Enable the Cross-Site Publishing feature.
6. Click the gear icon.
7. Click the link to view site contents.
8. Choose a list or library to catalog content for cross-site publishing.
9. View the list or library settings page.
10. Click the Catalog settings link.
11. SharePoint shows a page like that in Figure 6.

    

    Figure 6. List/Library catalog settings

12. Check the check box under the Catalog Sharing section—this enables the list as a catalog.
13. If the content of this list/library is to show on anonymous-accessible pages, click the button to enable anonymous access.
14. Choose fields that represent the primary key for items (I used ID and Title).
15. If you wish to allow catalog navigation, select the tagging field from your list to bind to a term set.
16. Click the OK button.

Configure Search

In the previous subsections, I demonstrated how to enable cross-site publishing and how to enable cataloging in a list/library. Feel free to catalog several lists and libraries before completing the following steps to configure search crawling of these libraries.

The steps in this section assume that you have a provisioned Search Service Application—if not, use the farm wizard to create one for the purpose of this exercise.

1. Open Central Administration.
2. Click the General Application Settings header.
3. Click the Farm Search Administration link.
4. Choose a Search Service Application from the list.
5. Click the Content Sources link in the left navigation.
6. Edit the Local SharePoint Sites content source.
7. Ensure that this source includes the site collection (or root site collection if under a managed path) for your publishing site.
8. Return to the content sources page.
9. Start a full crawl of the content source.
10. Click the link for the Crawl log.
11. Monitor for errors and ensure that the crawler indexes content from your publishing site collection.