Microsoft content management server mcms

Without any way to govern the look and feel, the website started to look more and more like grandmother's patchwork quilt with each sub-web having its own individual identity.

Content was duplicated all over the place. Updating content often meant scouring the entire website for the duplicates and amending the changes page by page. Say, the opening hours of a shop has been changed. Uh-oh, looks like another late night at the office.

Among the thousands of pages on the website, which ones contain the shop's operating hours? An emerging technology that has gained popularity in recent years is that of content management systems CMS. They come in many flavors and designs, the most common of which are web content management systems, designed to manage the process of uploading content from the desktop to the website. Microsoft Content Management Server has been around since It was first built by NCompass Labs, a Vancouver-based business that was one of the first players in the Content Management field.

The version was called NCompass Resolution. It started out as an enterprise-class web solution that empowered corporations to install and deploy fully functional content management system without help of external services.

In , it was sold to Microsoft. However, traces of its origins with NCompass can still be found in the package. It is a solution that can help you with almost all aspects of content management, from template development, content authoring, site management, and deployment, to data storage and retrieval.

MCMS can efficiently handle the smallest of websites with tens of pages to large enterprise solutions that contain hundreds of thousands of pages. It also offers tight integration with Microsoft's suite of products including its ubiquitous word processor, Microsoft Word.

Authoring is performed using either the browser-based component Web Author , or Microsoft Word when installed with Authoring Connector. Developers use Visual Studio. NET template files, a special kind of web form that defines the layout and behavior of each dynamically generated web page.

Several administrative interfaces are provided for managing the site structure and global settings: Site Manager, Database Configuration Application, and the Server Configuration Application. The following diagram shows the architecture and how the components connect with each other. The subsections that follow briefly describe what each module does. It does, however, have a part to play in how content is transformed from data in the backend database to HTML pages—called postings in MCMS—for the browser.

When visitors to your site request a page, they send its URL to the web server. It ensures that client-side scripts are handled correctly when a user wishes to compare two different versions of a single posting. It does this by injecting a JavaScript routine on the fly, modifying the output of the page doing the comparison.

It is a set of calls that hook into IIS and monitor events while the client reads a page from the server. They filter every request until they find one they need to process. If so, it transforms the incoming URL. It's not a pretty URL but it conveys a lot of information.

NET to process the web form, which in the above case is Plants. The form will render the content according to these repository items.

The posting's unique identifier is also known as its GUID, or globally unique identifier. GUIDs make excellent database keys. They are unique and prevent clashes when merging two sets of data together. With these instructions, control is passed over to IIS.

IIS sends the response back to the browser that made the request. All these processes are carried out transparently. The visitor to the website would not be aware that any URL transformation has taken place. Naturally, MCMS makes use of caching—an important concept that is used to boost its performance by minimizing database queries. Right-click on the node representing your server and select Properties from the pop-up menu.

You should see a dialog similar to the following screenshot. The filters are applied on a global level on your web server. Check that you are looking at the properties of the server represented by the icon of a computer: and not the individual website. Not everyone should be given access to author the website or view confidential information. MCMS provides security checks through the Security service see Chapter 10 for a detailed discussion of security.

The AESecurityService ensures that authentication is working correctly. When it is stopped, it is not possible to author your website as the web authoring tool will not be displayed. It is also responsible for maintaining the disk cache.

If you stop the service, the disk cache is cleared. By default, it is configured to start automatically when Windows loads. All MCMS objects—such as content entered by authors—are stored in this database. One of the greatest sources of confusion for developers is that web pages rendered by MCMS do not have a "physical" form.

The reason is because the pages are not stored in the file system. Chunks of information are stored in the content repository namely SQL Server database instead. They are assembled on the fly when requested, based on the logic coded by developers using the template files discussed in the earlier section How MCMS Renders Content.

Template files are a special kind of a web form. They are stored in the file system and contain the logic that governs the look and feel of the pages and how they behave.

As a developer, you will work with template files to write all code-behind scripts and HTML. We discuss template files in Chapter 6. It's the preferred tool for developers to construct the template files necessary for creating websites built with MCMS. We will be assuming that you are working with Visual Studio. NET throughout the book. While it is technically possible to use other development environments to create the code and template files, you will not benefit from several conveniences that result from the integration of MCMS and Visual Studio.

In this book, we present all code samples in C. Microsoft does not recommend direct updates to the MCMS database: documentation on how the database is updated is not even available. You should not attempt to do this yourself as doing so may cause your system to become unusable.

This provides a safe and structured way to retrieve, update, and delete the contents of the database. As a developer, you may have a natural inclination towards working with the database directly by writing Transact-SQL scripts to do additions, updates, and deletions. However, because the PAPI contains pre-packaged code, you would not need to write much of the code yourself, saving you valuable time.

All you need to do is to call the appropriate functions when and where you need them. You will use this set of library files if you work with templates that were migrated from an existing MCMS website.

When starting a website from scratch, it is highly recommended to develop with the ASP. Not only does it provide better performance, it offers many new features that are not available with the COM version. We will make use of it extensively throughout the book. There are several ways authors can get their content from the desktop to the Web.

They can enter content through:. MCMS provides data-entry components that have rich editing capabilities. These run on web pages, so all authoring can be done through the browser. There is no need to learn other web editing tools.

In fact, it allows authors to copy and paste pre-formatted text as well as drag and drop attachments. Business users are in total control over when and where the content is updated on the website. At the click of the Approve button, the material is made available online in real time—bypassing the need to have the material sent to a webmaster.

User-friendly web content management systems do not require authors to know any scripting languages. Microsoft Content Management Server goes the extra length to ensure tight integration with Microsoft Word. Authors don't have to leave the authoring environment they are already comfortable with, doing everything from the familiar Word interface, and with a few clicks of the mouse, their material can be published online.

Authors can write into rich text boxes and format text directly from Web Author. They can use familiar functions like applying bold, underline, and italics to selected text. It is possible to schedule when pages should be made live or expired. A publish date could be scheduled such that the information is uploaded to the system but made available only at midnight.

Similarly, expiry dates may be set to remove the content at a specified time. This automation makes things really convenient for authors who would otherwise have to add or remove the content manually at the appropriate times.

Reusing content in multiple places on the website is easy, and avoids having to maintain separate versions and the consequent need to manually copy from one page to another. Links that reference expired or deleted pages are immediately removed. Type enums. Stack Overflow for Teams — Collaborate and share knowledge with a private group.

Create a free Team What is Teams? Collectives on Stack Overflow. Learn more. Asked 10 years, 6 months ago. Active 10 years, 1 month ago. Viewed 2k times. I can see two main options: Migrate the data into a new simplified database and display that information in the new website. Matthew Dresser. Matthew Dresser Matthew Dresser Add a comment. Active Oldest Votes. Here's the process I've taken to get page content out of the database. As you've already seen the tables storing most of the data are Node and NodePlaceholderContent 1.

Id ,[page]. NodeGuid ,[page]. Name ,[created]. Username as 'CreatedBy' ,[page]. CreatedWhen ,[modified]. Username as 'ModifiedBy' ,[page]. ClientAccount [created] ON [created].

ClientAccount [modified] ON [modified]. Name ,[pageParent]. Name -- add page parent Name ,[created]. Node [pageParent] ON [pageParent]. Name ,[pageParent2]. Name -- add parent of parent name ,[created]. MOSS provides a framework for document converters, components designed to read content from an external format such as a Word document and convert it into a format that can be displayed within a content page.

Several document converters are scheduled to ship with MOSS , as well as a framework for building and integrating custom document converters. MOSS provides content deployment features that allow you to transfer content from one site collection to another.

This is valuable for companies that prefer to author content in a staging environment before moving it into their production environment. You take advantage of MOSS content deployment features by configuring paths and jobs.

A path defines one site collection as a content source and another site collection as a content destination. Once you have defined a path, you can define one or more jobs to move content from the source to the destination. Jobs can be run on demand or they can be scheduled to run at a future time or on a periodic basis. MOSS also supports a feature known as site variations for companies that need to duplicate a site's content for translation into multiple spoken languages or for targeting different types of rendering devices.

For example, imagine you have configured variation support for German, French, and Spanish. MOSS maintains a parallel structure across these three different sites with respect to pages and child sites.

When a content author adds a new page to the master variation site maintained in Spanish, MOSS automatically adds the same page into the structure of the other sites as well. MOSS can also be configured to create a WSS task marking the required translation as a to-do item for a language translator. While MOSS will not actually convert your content from one language to another, it does keep multiple sites in sync with respect to their content structure, which provides a good deal of value.

MOSS provides several caching options. NET page, it provides a more sophisticated framework to reach the same end. You can enable MOSS output caching at the site collection scope. When using these caching features, you configure caching profiles to control caching page items and complete pages in memory. MOSS also supports Web front-end disk caching. If you enable this cache, MOSS will begin writing the large files it retrieves from the SQL Server database into a special cache on the local file system of the front-end Web server.

This procedure eliminates the need to continually move. In particular, WSS 3. Developers have used these BI technologies as a platform for building dashboard-style applications that provide upper-level management with up-to-date data that reflects the health of a business and flags potential problems in a timely matter. Consistent customer feedback indicated that a large percentage of corporations maintain a significant amount of business logic in Excel workbooks, and that this business logic has been hard to reuse across a large organization.

Excel Services doesn't suffer from the same types of scalability problems that occur when you run the desktop version of Excel on the server. Excel Services also provides a server-side rendering engine that can display worksheets in the browser as HTML. That means a company can store its Excel workbooks in a centralized document library and make them viewable by users who don't even have Excel installed on their desktops.

Furthermore, users can see the numbers displayed by a worksheet within the browser without having any access to the business logic behind it, thereby protecting a company's intellectual property. The Microsoft Office system introduces a new paradigm, recognizing that companies maintain business logic within Excel just as they maintain business logic within compiled assemblies or SQL stored procedures.

To support this new paradigm, the Office team added many new features to the Office system products designed to expose and update this business logic as well as to protect the intellectual property represented by this logic. The desktop version of Excel has been enhanced to allow information workers with Excel expertise to publish and update their workbooks in a document library within an MOSS portal site or a WSS team site.

Users running Excel can view these workbooks through the familiar client experience while other users can rely on Excel Services to view the same workbook inside the browser.

Note that this new workbook publishing metaphor allows a company to maintain a single master copy of its critical workbooks. It also allows the workbook author to post updates without the need to involve the development or IT staff. It's important to note that the use of Excel Services isn't restricted to the browser. You can create a Windows Forms application that uses the server-side Excel calculation engine but that doesn't use the rendering engine.

For example, a Windows Forms application can use Web services from Excel Services to load a workbook on the server, enter input data, perform calculations, and return a result as shown in Figure You can see it's not that hard to take advantage of formulas in Excel spreadsheets from across the network in a desktop application. This example furthers the analogy that Excel Services exposes the business logic defined in a workbook just as SQL Server exposes the business logic defined in a stored procedure.

MOSS provides a special site template named Report Center for companies that want to build dashboard-style applications. Another important aspect of Report Center is the built-in support for creating and importing key performance indicators KPIs , visual BI indicators that tell a manager how some aspect of the business is doing. For example, the KPI for a product inventory level might display a green light when there is enough inventory to supply all the orders for the coming week.

However, the light might turn from green to yellow when the inventory level drops below some predefined threshold such as the amount of inventory required to supply orders for the next four days. The light then might change from yellow to red when the inventory level drops to a point where it will run out within the next 48 hours.

The main idea is that a KPI flags business problems that require immediate attention. For example, you can create a KPI whose indicator changes automatically depending on data it reads dynamically from a WSS list or an Excel workbook. The last aspect of Report Center I want to discuss is the built-in framework for filtering data before it's shown to the user. This is a key component of the MOSS dashboard framework because it makes dashboard pages more relevant to the user.

When a manager visits a Report Center site, the experience is enriched if the dashboard views have been customized with data that is relevant for that particular manager. For example, a sales manager for the Eastern region can be presented with a different view of sales figures than the sales manager for the Western region.

Furthermore, managers like to be able to see high-level data at first and then drill down into more specific categories on demand. MOSS supplies Web Parts that allow page designers and users alike to specify criteria such as the name of the current user, a date range, or a product category. These formats have been very hard to read and modify unless you go through the object model of the hosting Office application, such as Word and Excel.

As a result, companies have tried to run Office desktop applications on the server, which poses problems with scalability and robustness.

These formats use a new file standard for creating composite documents containing multiple inner XML files that factor out content from other aspects of the document such as formatting instructions, data, and code. The internal files contained within a package are known as parts. Other parts within a package can consist of binary files for items such as graphics, audio clips, and video.

A major goal of the Office Open XML File Formats is to provide a standard approach for reading, manipulating, and generating documents in server-side scenarios where using the object model of a desktop application such as Word or Excel isn't a viable option. Think about a scenario in a MOSS portal site when you have created and configured an event handler to fire whenever someone uploads a new Word document.

The new Office Open XML File Formats make it significantly easier to extract data or to perform hygiene on the document such as removing comments and personal information. You must also learn the specific package structure and XML schemas for the type of Office document you are working with. Some of these details will change as you move between Word, Excel, and PowerPoint documents. The InfoPath forms designer provides high levels of productivity because it significantly reduces or eliminates the need to write custom code when developing forms.

InfoPath also creates a very reliable way to collect data because InfoPath forms are built on top of XML schemas, allowing them to automatically validate the user's input. InfoPath provided a convenient integration point with WSS 2. A forms library is a hybrid WSS document library that uses an InfoPath form template as its underlying document template and acts as a repository for XML documents containing form data entered by users.

One common complaint that Microsoft received about this forms-based technology is that it required a full installation of InfoPath on the user's computer. This was true not only for those designing forms, but also for any users who needed to read or modify data in an InfoPath form. The problem was that the features of InfoPath did not extend to users for whom deploying Office on their desktop wasn't an available option. Forms Services renders InfoPath forms within the browser to reach users who are not running InfoPath.

You can use the InfoPath form designer to create Web-enabled forms, which can then be deployed to Forms Services. The form designer provides a compatibility checker to ensure that your forms contain only controls and elements that are compatible with what Forms Services can render to the browser. It's also possible to create and deploy InfoPath forms intended for dual use.