SharePoint CMS Hosting

Microsoft SharePoint products such as Microsoft Office SharePoint Server (MOSS), SharePoint Foundation 2010, SharePoint Server 2010, and Windows SharePoint Services provide users with rich web content management functionality for managing the content of intranet, extranet, and Internet sites. MS SharePoint Content Management System (CMS) can help you to create website templates, which can be distributed and deployed anywhere with ease. The Microsoft Hosted SharePoint CMS software helps you to build public facing websites based on MS technologies. MS SharePoint CMS is also a great tool for creating good-looking intranets, collaboration sites, publishing portals, and multi-lingual web sites.

 
 

SharePoint Content Management System acts on the underlying structure made of Site Collections and Sites. A standalone site in its own right, a Site Collection is the main, or top-most, part of a site. In addition, the Site Collection may have additional sites within its hierarchy. By grouping sites in a Site Collection, you’re provided with common branding and navigation abilities, the capability to share web parts, workflow, search and content types, as well as common features, policies and security. With Sharepoint’s Content Management System, you will also have the ability to manage other publishing elements like Roles, Audiences, Approval and Content Deployment among others.

In fact, there are only two fundamental concepts to learn and remember when publishing with SharePoint Content Management System: master pages and page layouts. The overall look and feel of your website will depend on these two elements. Here are a few more details about the key features of SharePoint CMS.

• Master Pages

• Master pages supply the common frame elements shared across pages, including the branding, navigation features, search fields, and help commands. To create your own master page, you can either modify an existing default master page, or you can create your own master page with SharePoint Content Management System.

• Page Layouts

• Page layouts, designed for use in conjunction with SharePoint Content Management System’s Web publishing features, specify the content arrangement and components for the page’s main content area. The Master Page provides a PageContentMain placeholder for this information.

• Content Types

• The page content is made up of content types, which provide necessary fields for the page layouts. Robust HTML and image controls giver your users the ability to create Web content, while the associated content type is specified at the time of page layout creation. In Office SharePoint Designer 2007, you can then set the associated content type fields with controls on the page layout. Before creating a page layout, you’ll need to designate the content type with the associated fields you need for that layout.

• Style Sheets

• Like most professional Web platforms, SharePoint Content Management System can modify CSS extensively to define the look and feel of Web pages. This enables you to apply your corporate style guidelines to your master pages and page layouts. This is typically the job of a Web designer or a Web developer.

• Authoring Options

• SharePoint CMS has two ways to author content: smart client authoring or browser based authoring. Smart client authoring allows authors to create their content using MS office tools and deploy it to a SharePoint site as an HTML page. The other common approach is to use browser based authoring.

• Approval Workflow

• Workflow is an important aspect to authoring. It’s rare you let authors submit content directly to production without going through some type of content approval process. SharePoint CMS comes with several out of the box workflow templates. The “Approval workflow” incorporates approver emails, tasks lists and status tracking. You can customize this workflow using SharePoint Designer & Customizations can include adding steps like translation or second level approval./li>

• Scheduling Content

• With SharePoint Content Management System, you can schedule time dependent content such as Press Releases for a later date.

• Deployment

• SharePoint CMS has built-in functionality to deploy content from a source site collection to a destination site collection – usually in a separate production web farm. You can deploy entire site collections or just specific sites. By default, deployment is incremental only copying content that has been added or changed/deleted.

For additional SharePoint Content Management System features, please see: MOSS vs WSS .