Preface

Microsoft Content Management Server 2002 is intended to be an outstanding reference on this emerging product. This book takes an in-depth look at CMS 2002 and outlines all areas of this product: from architecture to content authoring and publishing. In addition, we have chapters that detail how to create a site framework, administer a site, secure the site, and deploy the site in a production environment. There are several chapters on the Publishing API and how to extend CMS in your environment.

While most of this book is written for the developer in your organization, there are key chapters that will assist your infrastructure team in installing and monitoring a CMS 2002 production server.

In the first part of the book, we cover introductory information and the fundamentals of CMS 2002. This part has a short introduction to CMS 2002, discusses how to install CMS 2002, and then outlines the architecture for CMS 2002 in Chapter 3. Chapter 4 gives a sample outline on how to plan for a CMS 2002 implementation.

The second part of the book covers content authoring and publishing activities. We start this part by discussing the Web Author; then we move on to discussing publishing workflow in CMS 2002 and the Authoring Connector. This part is chock-full of examples and instructions on how to complete these tasks.

The third part of the book focuses on creating the site framework. We'll show you how to create a new CMS site and how to structure the channel, template galleries, and resource galleries hierarchies in your site. We also have inserted an excellent chapter on how to develop for CMS using Visual Studio .NET, with special attention paid to how a CMS project is different from a generic project. This part also includes several chapters that focus on templates, including a chapter on template-based page processing, one on creating templates, and other chapters that discuss planning, creating, and debugging CMS templates. Finally, we'll discuss working with placeholders in Visual Studio .NET, creating dynamic navigation elements, and connected postings.

The fourth part of this book focuses on site administration and security. Hence, we discuss how to work with containers, how to set up user security, how to use the Server Configuration Application, and how to secure access to your CMS site.

In Part V, we focus on site deployment issues, such as using the Site Deployment Manager and discussing various site deployment scenarios.

Part VI is for the folks who love the nitty-gritty and the details of CMS 2002. In this part, we cover PAPI, obtaining contexts, traversing channels, managing postings, manipulating postings, and finding CMS assets.

In Part VII, we discuss how to extend the functionality of CMS 2002. We cover topics like developing custom controls, customizing the Web Author console in Visual Studio .NET, extending the publishing workflow, publishing dynamic data in CMS, and building a Web service for CMS.

Part VIII is for those who administer a CMS 2002 server but don't code in the CMS environment. In this part, we cover capacity planning and performance monitoring issues, to help you run your servers more smoothly and efficiently. We also provide tips on troubleshooting

Part IX has migration information for those of you who need to migrate from CMS 2001 to CMS 2002.

Complete source code for the examples in this book is available for download at www.awprofessional.com/titles/0321194446.

No technical book has ever been written that can answer all the questions for every reader who picks it up. But this book will be able to answer most of your questions and show you how to install, manage, troubleshoot, extend, configure, and develop for CMS 2002.

Also, when it comes to purchasing a book, most readers evaluate the strength of a book, in part, based on who the authors are. Rarely has such a strong author team been assembled to write a book on a specific product. One of our authors works on the CMS team for Microsoft. Three other authors are very experienced developers, including one who is responsible for a nationwide CMS rollout on the CMS 2002 platform. By adding to that the direct support and enthusiasm of the CMS team at Microsoft, and three technical editors, we believe this book will be the benchmark work on CMS 2002.

We trust that you will find this book to be an excellent reference as you work toward a full CMS deployment in your organization.